290. Juanita Harrison—My Great, Wide, Beautiful World with Cathryn Halverson

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Episode 292: Juanita Harrison (My Great Wide Beautiful World) with Cathryn Halverson

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click Become a Patron to find out more. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off, forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY: Kim, here's my maybe unpopular opinion for the day. Nobody wants to hear about your vacation. Now, not you specifically, but just in general, I find recaps of vacations to be mind-numbingly boring, typically.

KIM: Yeah, it's almost a cliche at this point, isn't it?

AMY: Did you ever grow up going to somebody's house, like a neighbor or something, where they had the projector and a slide machine set up to show you their vacation photos? I feel like that was a distinctly 1970s kind of thing.

KIM: Yeah, exactly. But whether you love or hate travelogues, it's a thing.

AMY: Although Kim, I feel like you enjoy reading travel related books more than I do.

KIM: I do, I mean, it has to be, you know, an interesting perspective. I wouldn't want to read a book about everyone's vacation.

AMY: Right, exactly. So when today's lost lady, Juanita Harrison, was pitched to me for this episode, she was described as a woman who traveled the world and wrote about her experiences. And so my immediate instinct was to fall asleep at my keyboard. (I'm kidding.) But needless to say, I was not immediately convinced I wanted to pursue this one. However, the person who suggested this author to me is someone who gravitates toward one-of-a-kind personalities, so women writers who are sassy, unfiltered, and take no crap. So trusting her recommendation, I went ahead and picked up a copy of Juanita Harrison's book from 1936. It's called My Great, Wide, Beautiful, World, and within about three pages of reading this book, I fell in love with Harrison. She is truly remarkable and truly unforgettable.

KIM: Yes, and we should add that Harrison was no ordinary American tourist. She was a Black working-class woman who was born in Jim-Crow era, Mississippi in the late 19th century. She paid for these global adventures in part by picking up piecemeal work wherever she went as a maid, a nanny, or a cook. This account of her eight-year international adventure, her non-traditional “grand tour,” as it were, it became a bestseller making her at the time the most commercially successful African-American writer to date.

AMY: Okay. I know our listeners are going to love Juanita Harrison as much as we do say, so let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Cathryn Halverson, is a senior lecturer in English and American Literature at Linköping University in Sweden. She recently penned the first biography of Juanita Harrison. It’s called A Born Writer: Juanita Harrison and Her Beautiful World, published just last fall by University of Massachusetts Press. Cathryn joined us previously on this podcast in 2024 to discuss I Await the Devil’s Coming, the diary of Mary Maclane. If you haven’t listened to that episode, you’ll want to do so; that’s Episode No. 210.

AMY: Yes, Mary Maclane was the Victorian version of punk-rock. Cathryn, I actually remember being nervous about reaching out to you to see if you’d be our guest expert for that episode and you gamely agreed, and I loved that episode, so I was so thrilled when you reached out about returning for another episode – “She likes us! She really likes us!” Welcome back to the show!

CATHRYN HALVERSON: Thank you. I'm really happy to be back. I enjoyed doing that episode about Maclane, although you had so many hard questions and I had to go back to her books and really study to kind of remember what I used to know about her since it had been a good 20 years since I had written about her. But this time around, it's much easier since I just published that biography. And I was very surprised to hear that originally you were not attracted to the concept of her books. Most people get quite excited about the notion of a woman traveling around the world in the 1920s. Um, but very glad that the book itself convinced you although, you know, listening to you, I also realized maybe I don't like travel writing that much either. 

AMY: I don't know. I'm a little jaded about hearing somebody's depiction of the pyramids or something…

KIM: And now you're gonna be comparing everything to this one. It's gonna make it even harder.

AMY: Nothing can top this one, in my mind.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: So before we dive into Harrison's story, Kim mentioned earlier that you teach in Sweden, Cathryn, and you have actually lived and worked in 10 different US states and seven different countries. So I imagine that your own globe-trotting might be part of what drew you to Harrison in the first place?

CATHRYN: Well, maybe it's the other way around because I started writing about her in the 1990s, and at that time I hadn't really traveled internationally yet. Um, so slowly I've started to catch up to her and I find myself feeling competitive when I go someplace that she didn't make it to. But it's odd when you travel to see how her descriptions of places are still so accurate even a hundred years later. She says that in the streets of Seville, there's these pretty orange trees along the streets, full of oranges, and no one picks them because they're too sour. And then you go to Seville and there's those streets and there's those pretty orange trees full of sour oranges. It still seems very topical. You know, she's very inspiring as a traveler, not just because she went to so many places, but because of the way she interacted with people and made these connections, which most tourists don't wanna do or you don't really know how to do. She was also very relaxed about money. She felt confident about quitting jobs and knowing she could always find another just as good, which is an attitude that I wish that I could have. But the major attraction was just her writing, the quality of the writing itself. It's, as you know, it's just really good. It's rich, it's funny, it's full of ideas. It's very dense and available, you know, for intellectual discussions, but also just enjoyable. You can always find something new. There's a lot packed in there. 

KIM: Yeah, that's definitely right. Her book is composed of dated entries, like you're reading a journal, but they're actually letters. Can you explain the makeup of the book and how it eventually wound up in print?

CATHRYN: So the majority of the book is letters she had written to these former employers in Los Angeles, George and Myra Dickinson. They had employed her in the mid Twenties and they were her very supportive friends, throughout the rest of their lives. When the time came to write a book, she wrote to them to retrieve the letters and had them send them back to her in Paris. And she wrote to a lot of other people too, to have them send back the letters. And we don't know exactly who all the original recipients of the letters are, but once said all the letters in the book or to the Dickinsons. I don't think that's true, but most of them are. And she got the idea for the book, supposedly from another employer in Paris who said to her, you know, “you're such a good writer having seen her travel letters and you're having so many interesting experiences. So you should write a book.” And it took a few years, but eventually, together with a member of the family who was a freelance writer herself, they compiled those letters into a manuscript.

AMY: Could you talk a little bit about sort of the non-standard orthography in the book? It's not like reading a typical, perfectly edited book.

Cathryn: No, they decided somebody at some level decided not to correct her spelling, which is very idiosyncratic because she had very little formal education. And the grammar is, too. So they kept it as is, we assume, I mean, maybe they made some changes. And that was a little bit controversial or continues to be like, why did they decide not to clean it up? Were they trying to make her seem as if she were more uneducated than she was, for example? I don't know if you'd agree, but I think to preserve all that as it was written makes it far richer.

KIM: Completely. I mean, I feel like you're really getting her voice, so you can almost hear her speaking when you're reading it.

AMY: Initially you're like, “Oh, is this gonna be difficult to read?” No. It's almost like your brain switches over into her voice. And I had no problem deciphering it.

KIM: It's kind of fun too, when you don't know what a word is and you have to think for a second. It's like, oh, okay, that's what she's talking about. It's fine.

AMY: It didn’t slow down the process of reading it for me at all. 

CATHRYN: No. And it's interesting thinking about her reviews. I mean she had mostly positive reviews, but at the same time people called her illiterate, which is ironic because she published a book that they were reviewing, they were referring to that non-standard orthography throughout.

AMY: And it's interesting too that these are letters to her one-time employers because the way she's writing, it's very familiar. She holds nothing back, really. I’m thinking about how I would write to a former boss and it would be nothing like this, you know? So she was clearly almost a part of their family when she was working for them, or at least had a very comfortable relationship in just the way she's writing. There's nothing formal about her.

KIM: No.

CATHRYN: She dedicates the book to that former employer and, she says, you know, “your great kindness to me have made my travelering much happier. If you hadn't been interested in me, I never would've tried to explain my trips. Also, your true in kindness encouraged me and made me more anxious to tell you the story, to tell you the way I spent my time.” But it's complicated if you think about it, like how much is there a kind of a pressure? I mean, why did she choose this woman to dedicate her book to, does she feel she's a kind of patron and she needs to have that? And what's with her feeling anxious about telling her how to spend the time? So maybe it's a bit of a mix. I mean certainly my natural inclination is to feel kind of suspicious about that relationship, like these wealthy employees who were also racist, institutionally, in that they had a real estate firm with these racist policies, but a very close friendship with her. So one's instinct is to feel suspicious and yet repeatedly, again and again in her writing to other friends, she mentions how important these people are to her and how they were her only true friends, and the only people she could really trust and who supported her more than her own family ever did. So there's kind of layers to that relationship.

KIM: Yeah. It kind of reminds me of our episode on Zora Neale Hurston and some of the relationships she had with patrons. Yeah. 

AMY: Sometimes you have to play a part. Yeah. Okay, so we're gonna talk a lot more about the book she wrote, but let's back up first and get to know Juanita Harrison from before she embarked on this world tour. It's a little hard to do because there's not much information available, which Cathryn, you can readily attest to. Let's start with some of the facts that we know for sure.

CATHRYN: So we know for sure she was born in 1887, even though she often claimed it was 1891. But all of the public documents put it there, 1887. This was in Columbus, Mississippi. She had very little formal education and even as a child, she started working as a maid in these rich ladies' houses. Um, she left Mississippi around the age of 21, it seems. And once she left, she just started working and traveling in all these different places in the United States so she worked in the south, the Midwest, the west, the northeast. She was in New York. She also spent time in Cuba and Canada. So some of that was working, some was traveling. But she just kept shifting around. And some places seemed logical, but others don't really, like, why was she in Iowa? But eventually she did end up in the 1920s in Los Angeles working for the Dickinsons, who went on this around the world tour. This trip was for the elite of the elite, with a ship taking them to these different places. Um. I think maybe that gave her some inspiration to start making transatlantic journeys and also to think about an around the world trip of her own. So this eight-year extravaganza, she always described it as her around-the-world trip, even though she spent about five years settled in southern France working, but she did leave Hoboken, New Jersey and cross the Atlantic, and eight years later she crossed the Pacific and landed in Honolulu. So she did go around the world.

KIM: So My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, as you're reading it, you feel like you're just getting this steady supply of descriptive, fascinating postcards written by a close friend. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's really poignant. She's clearly having the time of her life, and yet you point out in your biography that Harrison's writing falls under the tradition of the African American freedom narrative. So as joyful as it is, Harrison's book is born of this inherent desire to escape. Can you talk some more about that?

Cathryn: Yes. She doesn't say much about her past, but she does refer kind of darkly to people not helping her and to being let down and to being gossiped about. And she says something like, “at 11 I decided what I wanted to do with my life. At 13, I started to figure it out. At 21, I had it just right, and now I'm living my life the way I want.” So she got it dialed in pretty early, I think. But as an African-American woman with little formal education, she was expected to work and she didn't want to work. She wanted to travel, to have fun, to have new experiences, meet new people. She once said something like, “I can always get a job whenever I want to, but I'm never too happy when I do. It's when I give it up that I have the grand feeling.” She just thought it was boring to stay in one place for a long time, and as she said to see the same faces for a whole year … she would never want a life like that. I mean, eventually she did settle in different places, but her philosophy was not to.

KIM: Love’em and leave ‘em.

AMY: Love ‘em and leave ‘em, 100%. I kept thinking of Mary Poppins because she would swoop into these people's lives, she would bring this magic in a lot of ways to the world, and then when she got the itch, it was time — she would take off. And it didn't seem like she had any remorse about it. She never remarks about how hard it was to say goodbye to the children or anything like that.

KIM: Meanwhile, they're begging her to stay.

AMY: They're begging her to stay because she is an amazing worker. And she knows it!

KIM: There's something so traditionally masculine almost about that. Just the way she traveled the world with so much confidence.

AMY: Well, yeah, because she would decide if she would take the job or not. Like, do you pass muster for me? When she gets to London and she's like, “Oh, I'm not gonna take any jobs where they have the white stairs leading down to the street because I don't wanna have to keep those white stairs clean.” So she was very selective.

KIM: Everything is on her terms, which is so inspiring.

AMY: Yeah.

CATHRYN: Or at least she did a really good job of making it seem like it was that way.

 AMY: Okay… so she's maybe framing it in a way. I didn't even think of her as an unreliable narrator, Cathryn? What’s going on?

KIM: Yes. Let's talk about this!

CATHRYN: Well I didn’t write about her that way either. Like I take it pretty straight. But, um, Was she ever not able to find a job or had to take a job she didn't really like? She certainly doesn't make it sound like it, but I mean, one thing that's certainly true is you realize she has this kind of privilege as this expatriate worker. The reason why she can get all these different jobs is because she's an American and she's really skilled and she's a native English speaker. So she was attractive to these expatriate families, or British families who wanted someone like that, whereas if she'd been this like local Spanish servant, she wouldn't have had those choices. If she was an English woman, maybe she would have to have taken the job and whited the stairs.

AMY: Correct. She had privilege in that way, but the fact that she would sometimes in this book tell us about the jobs she didn't like… I'm thinking of the time she had to kind of be a substitute servant for somebody who was like can you just fill in for me for a few weeks ? And she hated the woman that she worked for, and she recalls, “Every day I had to stuff her inside this rubber corset.” I remember her saying that. And then the husband is like, ‘Look, I'm just gonna pay you more money. Please stay, until the other one comes back.’ So the fact that she was being honest about that job makes me think she is setting her terms. 

KIM: Remember the one where the woman and she end up throwing pillows at each other?

CATHRYN: That works out, that she could throw pillows at this woman and not be fired.

AMY: Yeah. She almost has that attitude like “I'm gonna call the shots here.”

KIM: Yeah. “The Juanita Harrison Self-help Book.”

AMY: Oh my God. If only we could have that. Um, anyway, so she's jumping from job to job, you know, according to her wont. Like the Led Zeppelin song …I've really gotta ramble…

KIM: [sings] Ramble on!

AMY: Ramble on! Yeah. Yeah. Um, so when she gets that itch. She quits her job, she moves to the next place, but she does sort of have resources that she relies on to make sure her travels go smoothly, right?

CATHRYN: Yeah, I mean, she really relied on this network of YWCAs, which were global, where she could feel pretty confident about getting a bed and having this community and a network of people to talk to and give her information about the place and also about the next place where she might want to go. She was part of a pretty established travel infrastructure, you know, she changed money at Thomas Cooks. She had sort of mainstream travel books and timetables that she would consult. She would get her mail sent to post response at different places, which was really useful since sometimes they sent a little money in those envelopes or sent her packages. She would go to the library to read about her destinations. So she had all these sort of like, formal structures that she worked within. At the same time, she made these connections with the local people and she was always asking them for advice and getting the inside tips. So maybe she'd start at the YWCA, but then she'd meet someone on the street who would tell her about a better or cheaper room or, you know, ways to get tickets on third-class steamers as opposed to the bigger companies.

AMY: And it's funny you mentioned third class. She even says at one point “First and second class are the same, the world over, but it is the third class that are so interesting.”

KIM: Like the Titanic!

AMY: Yeah. They're the ones having fun.

KIM: Exactly. They're the one dancing and everything. Yeah.

AMY: Right. Until the boat goes down.

KIM: It's almost hard to believe that it could be as safe for her as it was. In fact, I was talking to my husband Eric this morning about this book and her, and he's like, “I stayed out by myself on a roof with some people, (well other people not by himself, even) on a roof in Cairo in like the late eighties. We were nervous about nobody being there, to help if we needed it.” How do we see her navigating that? You know, she spends nights out in the city. 

AMY: Yeah. She would sleep in a park if she didn’t have a room for the night.

KIM: Yeah.

CATHRYN: Well, I think she did that once. She slept out on the river in Switzerland, and she said something like, ‘Why should I shut myself up in her room when there's all this beauty around here?” But she had a kind of uncomfortable night. Then there were these men who were worried about her and they actually sort of stayed with her until the sun rose. That wasn't her normal mode. But you know, we see her being careful about which rooms she chooses. And she says she always looks for a family-like place. And if there were too many men staying there, she wouldn't go. Um, she had to kind of negotiate… she got a lot of male protection, so she had to kind of actively manage that. Like she wanted these men to kind of help her and buy her food and get her seats, but she also didn't want them to cling to her. So she had to figure out how to get rid of them. She'd have different strategies, I mean, there's one incident in which she meets a man on the street and he takes her out to get French pastries and afternoon tea, and she has a really good time. And then, they agree to meet for breakfast the next day at her hotel, but that's not her hotel. She leaves that night, so she doesn't see him again. I mean, again, we can wonder about what didn't make it in the book or got edited out. I mean, there's one scene where she talks about, you know, these young men or boys getting fresh with her, you know, on the streets in the dark. And makes it sound like it's just fine. And it's like, “and then I punched him and they ran away.” But, you know, you wonder, um, you know, I think most people would register that as pretty terrifying. 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: She does write somewhere that, “I like to flirt with the men in every place I go,” just to compare it.

KIM: See how the men are in every country. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah. Um, but yeah, she's very savvy about how she does it. And then as you said, she's like, oh, I need to get him off my hands now. And at the same time you get the sense that, you know, she's a Black woman and being abroad is actually a safer place for her to be than in the United States in some respects, which is wild.

CATHRYN: Yeah. Yeah. And, and again, basically like she had that American privilege, but since she was outside of the US she didn't have that American racism to deal with. At the same time, she was ambivalent about her American identity and sometimes would say, you know, “I don't confess to being an American,” or “I say I'm a Cuban.” Because she was embarrassed by the “ugly American” abroad, especially in France. She was light-skinned and sort of ethnically ambiguous, so different people she met would draw their own conclusions about her ethnicity or her nationality. So, you know, in Spain they would think she was Cuban. And then when she was in Djibouti, they thought she was maybe Greek or maybe Chinese. And she'd always write them down because she thought they were funny too.

AMY: She loved going to these like exhibitions, circuses, anything like that she would make sure she was at in a city. Um, but talk about the Jardin de Aclimitacion, however you wanna say… I’m pronouncing that poorly, but.

CATHRYN: I mean, that's a really complicated scene and I often sort of use that to sort of introduce the complexities of her identification. Here are these women who were being displayed as a kind of anthropological exhibit, and people would go and, and pay money to see them. And she got into the exhibit or the fair without paying, which was typical of her. And she made some connections with these women instead of just observing them, she sat with 'em by the fire and they offered her food and she said something like, “I think they saw I had some of their blood. I couldn't fool them,” meaning they recognized her of African heritage. Again, we wonder, you know. But then she's also distanced herself from them and she's describing their features and their lack of sanitation in her view. And so she was keeping her distance from them. Um, and then when she leaves, she climbs over the fence so she wouldn't have to pay like the exit fee. So, she's describing these women who appear captive but she's sort of floating in, has a little bit of interaction, and then she departs, freely. So it is complicated the way she's kind of using these women to make herself look especially, free and kind of cosmopolitan. She can connect with them, but then she can leave. There's a lot going on there.

AMY: It's interesting too, and another point you brought up in the book, in your book, is, um, that she was actually kind of living out the sort of international outlook that the Black intelligentsia back in the States, you know, the figures of the Harlem Renaissance were espousing.

KIM: She was living it.

CATHRYN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's a sense that, you know, some of those connections that she's making with all these people that she meets, it's because she's a woman of color. You know, that if you're a white woman, this wouldn't be happening. But she, again, she's of this sort of ambiguous dark complexion, and no one quite knows what it is. But it allows her to connect up with all these different populations in interesting ways. And there's an essay by Chimene Jackson that I quote in my book a couple of times. Jackson mentioned she's showing up the kind of helplessness of these white women that she works for, and she's showing how dependent they are and how rigid they are, and how unlike Harrison they are. They need to be served and they're dependent on that service, and that she's kind of more sophisticated than they are, because she doesn't need that.

AMY: And how they're kind of missing out on the real joy of life. She's encountering so much that's real. 

CATHRYN: True. Those employers never look like they're having that great of a time really.

KIM: No.

CATHRYN: But at the same time, you know, she's living in the Ritz too, when she’s working for them and she lives with them, she can be living in quite luxurious conditions. She does get to enjoy these locations, like when she's working on her book in Paris and enjoying the view of the Seine and Notre Dame, or when she's in Los Angeles and this kind of nice neighborhood, she does through work, get to live in nice places. 

AMY: But she’s just as comfortable being in the tent in the desert in Morocco or wherever.

KIM: In a crowded train, you know, with the rain coming in and everything. Yeah. She's soaking it all in.

Cathryn: No, you're definitely right. Definitely right. It's true. And then there's that time when she’s in Mumbai, and it's just really basic. It's like a pallet and a couple of, you know, kitchen implements and she's like, “this is perfect to live like this, and it only cost me 50 cents a day” or something.

KIM: Yeah, she does draw the line at rats. There's that rat-fighting scene and she's like, “I'm not staying here. The rats are fighting in the…

AMY: I mean, yes, she is discerning. In those poorer countries if she would see a meal being served and there were flies hovering around the meal, she would say “No thank you.”

KIM: Not eating them.

AMY: And she would go get a piece of fruit and some soap and wash it in her lodgings, because she was trying to stay safe, both physically and in terms of her health.

KIM: Yeah, I mean, she sleeps in train stations, you know, bathrooms in train stations. At times, they let her sleep in them. You know, she says they're clean, but has to sleep sometimes in really strange places. 

CATHRYN: Someone’s kitchen table or something.

KIM: Yeah. So, even though she seems unscathed in a lot of ways throughout this travel, there are some crazy things that she witnesses or is even a part of. Um, for example, there's one point in Czechoslovakia, she's on a train that derails. So she is in a mass casualty event. She is flung across the train car. Um, but apart from a black eye, she is fairly uninjured. She does end up even receiving a small financial settlement later as a result. It's mailed to her while she's traveling. But she ends up helping these people who are thrown from the train, who are severely injured or dying. Um, and she also witnesses a freak accident onboard a ship where a passenger falls and has injuries that he probably won't survive. So there's some fraught and shocking moments in the book, but the vast majority of her accounts are filled with wonder and curiosity and joy and that side of her personality captivates everyone she meets, she becomes something of a novelty wherever she goes. So maybe this would be a good moment to read a few passages from the book. So, Cathryn, let's start with you. Is there anything you'd like to read to give people some flavor of 

CATHRYN: I’m thinking about the pillow throwing scene that you mentioned, and liked what you said earlier about how they seem like a series of postcards because she has her favorite length. It's like this chunk of paragraph and it always ends with a little punch. Um, but this is when she's in Bombay or in Mumbai and she says: I had a nurse job with an old lady that was a little quare, but I gave it up I got tired of getting up at 2 AM to write out dying remarks. The husband of the old lady I was taking care of was so extremely a gentleman. He dressed in white duck suites. He would never sit in the company of his wife and myself without his coat. His parents was Scotch, but he had never been out of India. She was English and came to India to teach school. She'd say at first “the Lord has sent her to us. Now husband, you pray” she'd say, then we close her eyes and fold our hands and pray. After I guess she thought the devil sent me. She was terribly jealous that's how we fell out. She would call out from the bed, “oh, Frank, you are not out there talking to that young woman. I won't stand anything like that.” And she would throw pillers. then I threw pillers and she would say, “Come here, Frank. I'm afraid of her. She has a temper.” And he would say, “Well, so have you a temper.” She was very particular had lots of old lace and must have been a very pretty and brilliant woman. I have soft print and blue dresses I always keep them fresh. I wear them with a big black belt and she would say, “You keep all pumped up and so nice, and I am ill.” And then she just ends it at that.

AMY: Imagine getting that as a letter from somebody that's traveling and you're like, “What the heck is she up to now?” Well, I have a passage that will kind of show the other extreme so clearly that, um. Pill of a woman didn't like Juanita. But the passage I'm gonna read, you're gonna see some people who like her very, very much. Um, this is when she is in Jerusalem, I believe, and she has, kind of just arrived, and met, a man who she befriends. She said, I spoke to a Gentleman he spoke a little English and were the Village Doctor and from Poland. I knew I had found a friend so I left all the worry for him. [And she's talking about like, where I'm gonna stay tonight, that sort of thing.] He was afraid he couldn't find a place for me I told him not to worry I would be delighted to spend the night sitting on my suitcase on the porch of the hotel and he wanted to know how I could be so happy when I had no shelter for the night and would say to himself how interesting I could hear him say it. He asked me if I was hungry. Then I thought how hungry I am. He took me to an elderly German Jewish couple where he have his meals but he had a room in the hotel. The couple were Two Dears. She gave us soft boiled eggs cheese fresh butter milk and such good bread I keep them busy bringing bread and butter. I noticed them smiling, but I did not think about what they were smiling at until I got filled and I said to the doctor I can't eat anymore. then I said to him maybe the couple would let me sleep in the dining room He said I will ask. and the lady said Yes. everything was clean as a pin. She put a couch in the dinning room for the Husband, and she and I slept in the bed room. All she could say in English was. and It was good. then I would answer that It was good. the next morning she repeated the supper and the Doctor came and we had breakfast together. I left at 9 AM for Nazareth. She kissed both of my cheeks and gave me a bag of grapes and asked me to write to Her. 

Literally in the course of one evening, she just made a best friend right there!

KIM: That's just a little example of what happens throughout the book. 

AMY: Just like, “I'll sit on my suitcase. It's no big deal. I'll just wait here on the porch.” Then he’s like, “You don’t have to do that.” It always works out for her. 

KIM: She also says things like, “I don't care what religion you are, that's fine. We have our things. They have theirs.” You know, she's very open to everybody. So I think that's one of her strengths too. I'm gonna read the funeral pirate one, I think, but it was hard because the Taj Mahal one is so great. There are so many great ones. She's in India. The River is very yellow but the water clean. I took a Boat of a Kind naked Coolie and sat in a comfortable Chair and had a pleasant trip passing many Ghats The boat cost 18 cents after my bargain. I saw one Pyre on fire and a male and female corps wrapped in bright red waiting to go on. I got out and went back to witness the whole thing. It is not at all horrid to look at anyway I am quite a Hindu now. Then I thought of the millions of wives that have been burned alive in the same spot only a few years back. A Holy Man was sitting like a Buddha statue under an umberella near the Funeral Pyres and I stood around looking at him to see if I could get his eye there was a Hindu nearby not quite as holy as he was so he began to flirt with me asked me why I was all alone and said I look different. A good Flirtation was just the thing after the Funeral Pyres.

AMY: She’s so sanguine about this experience where anyone else would just be like, aghast.

KIM: Yeah. “A good flirtation is just a thing!”

AMY: To get over seeing the burning corpses!

KIM: I know, I know.

AMY: And then her recognition of like all the women that died there…

KIM: Yes. It's not like she's not seeing that. But she wants to enjoy every bit of life, even the dark side, I guess. 

AMY: She's just soaking it all in. I made a note in the margins of my book that she's like the OG Anthony Bourdain,

KIM: Oh, Uh-huh.

AMY: At one point, I forget what country she's in. offers her these like betel, B-E-T-E-L leaves, which I guess are like maybe a slight narcotic or something, I'm not sure. And she goes back to her host family and her mouth is all red from chewing these leaves and they're like, “What did you do?” But she's just like up for anything, which I love and made me think of Anthony Bourdain. Like when in the culture, experience the culture.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: She's also a big fan of bull fighting and she says at one point, um, “bull fighting and ice cream are the two best things on earth,” which I loved. There's also a time in Spain where she writes back that she is taking Spanish dancing lessons and it made me laugh because she said, um, you know, I'm taking these dancing classes. “It's mostly children. They are, from four years on up. I am the oldest pupil.”

KIM: I love her.

AMY: And she loves the castanets or whatever they are that she gets.

Cathryn: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: She is one of a kind, and that's why everyone loves her as she's traveling around because she has these observations, this way of looking at the world, it's very unusual. 

AMY: She was also a big wedding crasher.

KIM: Mm, yes.

AMY: Like I think in Cairo, she's like, “Every single week I go crash a wedding.” Weddings, funerals, she crashes.

KIM: Religious services where she's not supposed to be. Yeah, yeah.

AMY: And then she also, as you mentioned before, she kind of gets in free on all the tourist attractions like, “Oh, I slipped in on the tour that, you know, I didn't pay for it,” or people would just be like, “Yeah, I like you just go in for free.”She could charm people. So it is this woman, Mary Morris, um, who was the mother of Mildred Morris, who now remind me, Mildred Morris was an employer in England.

CATHRYN: They were in Paris. They were Americans who, all actors. It was Mary Morris, had been married to this famous vaudevillian, Felix. And, uh, the two daughters were both actors and Mildred Morris played Wendy and the first major production of Peter Pan on Broadway.

AMY: Yes. Amazing.

CATHRYN: By the time Harrison worked for them, they weren't acting. And Mildred Morris, I think she was doing like, kinds of freelance writing. And she had written in New York as a journalist, and now she was doing some kind of high culture things in Paris. Um, so yeah, it was Mary Morris who basically said like, you should write a book. and a couple years later, Harrison came back and she said, I'll work for free for you if you help me get that book done. So they did. She didn't work for free for them, but in fact they seemed to be working for them. Like she stayed for free at their neighbors and they brought down her food and said she worked in the morning on the manuscript with Mildred and then had the afternoons off. And I think that Mildred continued to work and arrange and, and try to put it together.

AMY: Listeners, perhaps many of you have actually been to the location where Juanita Harrison was working on this book in Paris, do you wanna say what that building is today?

CATHRYN: Well, it houses new Shakespeare & Company, so not the original one,

KIM: Wait, they moved Shakespeare & Company? When?

AMY: There were two locations. First when Sylvia Beach was running it, and then later when someone else was running it.

KIM: Oh, okay.

CATHRYN: It wasn’t the same business. I don't, I think, I mean, I think it's like her bookstore and then that closed, and then this other person opened a bookstore that he named after the first one.

AMY: Yeah, but people flock to Shakespeare & Company, still.

KIM: Yeah, I mean, I've been there a bunch. That's the one I've been to. 

CATHRYN: As a tourist way back when, I didn't realize that it was newer. I thought it was original, too. But I mean, it's this big apartment building, but her apartment where she wrote that book or where they worked on the book together, it was in that same structure. 

KIM: That is so cool. 

CATHRYN: And a couple miles away Gertrude Stein was writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 

KIM: Yeah,and she was part of that writing life in Paris. Yeah. Um, let's talk about, um. We mentioned how popular this book was in our introduction, when it came out. Can you tell us more? How popular was it?

CATHRYN: You know, I hadn't realized at first what a big seller it was. It was the bestselling book by an African American writer up to that point. So this was 1936.

KIM: Wow.

CATHRYN: And you can see it um, newspaper list of like the bestsellers for that week or that month, like in Los Angeles. She was making that list a number of times, but also just in the newspapers, these passing references to Juanita or to My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, the expectation that readers would know who they were talking about, that she entered the culture in that way. So it sold a lot of copies. She had a lot of reviews. Most of them were positive, some of them were kind of condescending, you know, I mentioned before calling her illiterate, but the. the more sophisticated ones, discuss both her personality, but also the strength of her writing that she was a good writer. And the name of my own book is A Born Writer, which is what Mildred Morris called her when they started to say, you know, “you should write a book, you're a born writer.” And she privately thought to herself when they said that she thought, “I thought about how far I've come from what I was born,” which is an interesting sentiment.

KIM: Yeah.

CATHRYN: But Alain Locke called her a moronic menial. He said something like “a moronic menial goes on a trip, and at the end of it, she writes a book and she's a moronic menial.”

KIM: Oh my God. That’s so disturbing.

AMY: And Alain Locke is the same guy who we had a little beef with in our Jesse Redmond Fauset episode.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: He caused a little problem for her.

CATHRYN: Okay. So that's not surprising then. So at the time, by then she had returned to Hawaii. She was in the United States, or it was, Hawaii was still a territory then, but she was living in American territory. Her book was selling well, she was getting royalties and so she mentioned saying, you know, I don't have to work as much as I did before. But she also says, “but I am still a maid.” So instead of working full-time, it seems like now she was working part-time and you know, she was living really inexpensively at that time. And that makes me wonder, like, she getting ripped off by her publishers? 

KIM: Yeah. Seriously.

CATHRYN: If you have a book that's selling like crazy and you've written a bestseller, yet the money coming in right at that peak royalty time is still not enough to support a very frugal lifestyle. Well, who's getting all that money? 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Is this when she's living in the rented backyard in the tent?

CATHRYN: Yeah. And her rent was two-fifty, so she was paying very little and, you know, she's eating like fruit, um, fruit. So I do feel like something about her contract was not very favorable to her.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. You'd think especially then making it on the bestseller list.

CATHRYN: Mm-hmm.

KIM: Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. So she's in Honolulu in the mid 1930s and that's where the epilogue of her book wraps up. Um, she's in this backyard that I mentioned as she has a custom design tent. And she describes it as her first and only home, but she stayed there for just five years and then that wasn't the end of her journey, was it?

CATHRYN: No. And the thing about that tent is she rented that pot of land from a Japanese family who had six children or so. And her letters, you know, include references to these children and buying them presents. And they had this nice relationship since she did stay there for some years. I mean, normally she's more this rolling stone, but she must've liked it. I would've stayed there, but she moved on. Um, she wanted more adventure and so she went to an entirely new continent. She sailed to Brazil and she traveled in South America for about a year and a half. And then she more or less settled in Argentina for a while. She lived in Mar del Plata, which was, at the time, a seaside resort town. She would've been in her mid fifties, and you know, we don't really know too much about what she was doing there. There's just a few hints. But I did go to Buenos Aires last year and I could see the neighborhood where she lived and she was always in the center of places. Like it makes her easier to find. She isn't in some random remote suburb. She's like right in the middle of everything. But then around 1952, she returned to the US and we see her living in La Jolla in this very expensive property. So presumably she was employed there.

AMY: That's California, for people who don’t know La Jolla.

KIM: Yes.

CATHRYN: She refers in passing to Venice Beach. That's where her bank account was when she died. But at the end of her life, she went back to Hawaii and she was living in Honolulu when she died in 1968 … 1967, 1968. Um, she was almost 80, so she made it back. I don't know how long she was there for. There's kind of a gap between 1952 and her death in 1967 and 68. Like where exactly was she spending her time?

AMY: And it does seem like Hawaii was one of her favorite places on the planet of all the places she had been. Um, she mentions that she just loves Hawaii. Um, but you discovered upon visiting her grave site there, that her death may have actually been a lonely one. Can you talk about that?

CATHRYN: I don't know if it was lonely, but she wasn't wealthy. When I visited the grave, one of the managers that led me to that grave, 'cause it's this enormous, enormous property, said that the people in that area died as wards of the state. And she said that that meant not necessarily that they were poor, more they just didn't have someone to arrange the burial for them. So the state had to do it, but she did have money in the bank and they took money from her bank account to buy her dress that she got buried in. Um, so she wasn't. I just imagine that her final days, or months or years were on her own terms and pretty appealing that she was kind of swimming and eating fruit and hanging out with these people. So I don't think she had a sad end.

AMY: That makes me feel better. I hear “ward of the state” and I go to the worst place imaginable.

CATHRYN: I do too! I mean, I do too. And the woman working at the cemetery, she tried to kind of reassure me. She's like, well, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that, but it’s true. She doesn't have a big stone. She has this little flat marker, but she had $401.04 in her bank account at the time, and that's not nothing. And she had these monthly checks and she had a decent apartment.

KIM: Okay.

AMY: Did you have any other kind of interesting or Eureka moments while you were writing her biography?

CATHRYN: I wouldn't say eureka moments, but I had like, some kind of surprising coincidences at least, I was, you know, fortunate enough that I could do a lot of travel and, following her footsteps. And ended up in Nice staying at the hotel where it turns out she had stayed and that she had written about. And I wasn't the one that chose that hotel and only discovered it once. You know, I, I thought the name sounded kind of familiar and I looked it up and she'd written about like, Hotel de Plaisance, and I talked to the proprietor a little bit and I tried to get him excited about the fact that this writer used to live here. He didn't really didn't care. Um, but he had said that the hotel was closing in just a few months, so it'd been around for a hundred years or so. And I was able to stay there shortly before it closed.

KIM: Just in time.

CATHRYN: When I was staying at a youth hostel in Honolulu, and then I went to the courthouse and found some of her appropriate records, and that's when I saw the address of where she'd been living, her final address in Honolulu, and it was right across the street from my hostel. Like I could see it from the balcony. um, she stayed in a youth hostel in Kobe, in Japan, in the neighborhood where I lived for a long time. And even quite recently at, I took another trip to France and at the end booked the wrong hotel and, but decided I would just go and stay there. It was in the wrong town, but then that turned out to be in the town where she had lived at the end. So there were these little moments that seemed a little bit eerie. But as I said, at the same time she was always in the center.

AMY: So it's like coincidence, but not because everybody visiting would be in that area.

CATHRYN: Exactly right.

AMY: But it does seem like little road markers. Yeah.

KIM: Yeah. Is there anything else you want our listeners to know about Juanita Harrison?

CATHRYN: Well, I'm just thinking about her, her final, you know, couple of decades, which are not very well mapped out. And, you know, we've talked about her networking and her correspondence and her writing all these letters, and I'm sure there's letters out there and other people's collections, letters that she wrote and that they'll be discovered here and there. As a sort of, you know, working class traveler, there is no Juanita Harrison archive per se. There's a few papers at UCLA, but no one's gone out there and collected her papers. But there's these letters out there, which I'm sure people are going to come across, in the years to come. Um, and finally, we talked about this a fair bit, but. Of course it's her travels or what make her so unique and flashy and, and stand out. But the more I did this study as I entered into it, the more interested I got in her work and her labor and how she wrote about it and how she controlled it and how she managed it. as an example of how one African American woman in the early to mid 20th century, controlled her own time and her own economic conditions in order to have the experiences that she wanted.

AMY: I think when you finish reading her book, the first thing you wanna do is find out more about her. Like, what's the rest of her life like? Who is she? I want to know everything about her. 'cause of course her book is just about her travels and that's why I'm so happy that you did the work to actually give us that, that biography of her life. So great job. Thank you for devoting, I mean, countless years to this work. It's amazing. I was a person who was a skeptic…

CATHRYN: You were.

AMY: …when you first reached out to me, and I gifted a copy of this book to a good friend of mine who often travels alone. She's one of the first people I traveled abroad with when we were in our early twenties. She's like my travel buddy. I gave it to her because I just think Juanita is so inspiring and she's so relatable and fun. She's a blythe and intrepid spirit. And to see the way that so many strangers were. Just magnetically attracted to her, helped her, were kind to her along the way, and how she was kind back, how she could laugh with people despite not having even a shared language she could interact with and make a connection with people. I think this book is just such a great reminder that most people in this world are good and that we can get along.

KIM: Amy, it totally made me think that too. I love the way you articulated that because with all the news and everything, we're getting all the negative stuff all the time to read this. It kind of gives you a different perspective on the world and a different way to look at things, and I think it's really valuable right now, especially.

AMY: Yep. Cathryn, I'm curious, what are you working on now? Anything you wanna

Cathryn: Yes. Thank you for asking. Right now I'm in the middle of writing a biography of Era Bell Thompson. And Thompson was the longtime editor of Ebony Magazine. Eventually she too traveled very widely, as a correspondent for the magazine, but as a young woman, she was inspired to take her very first trip by reading Harrison's book, which is a nice connection. And she writes about it in she says, “Ever since reading Juanita Harrison's Great Big, Beautiful World [sic] I'd been threatening to go around the world too, had literature on European bicycle tours, rates for tramps, steamers catalogs from the universities. So alone I set out to see the west. So, having read this book, she then took this train and bus trip to California and to Washington State and to, um, Vancouver Island just for a few weeks. It cost her like $200, but when she came back to Chicago, all of her friends thought she must be a big, rich snob because she'd taken this kind of trip for pleasure. Um, which again, makes us, you know, think about, mid 20th century travel, at this time for these single women. But I was very happy to discover, um, while teaching American Daughter actually in North Dakota where Thompson grew up, to suddenly see this comment about Harrison and the impact that her book had.

KIM: Perfect. As Amy said, I think you spent a significant number of years trying to piece together this picture of Juanita Harrison or as complete as we can get for now, and hopefully more scholarship and more discoveries will be forthcoming. Thank you so much for doing this important work. Thank you for introducing us to her. Thank you for coming on the show again. You're great. Thank you.

Cathryn: I appreciate that. Thank you. I've really enjoyed talking about our book with you. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. We'll be back in two weeks, but if you hate waiting that long, consider becoming a member of our Patreon community for a nominal monthly fee. You'll get access to our twice monthly bonus episodes, or you can purchase any bonus episodes and pay as you go.

KIM: Don't forget also to give us a rating and review wherever you listen.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jenny Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by AMY Helms and Kim Askew.