Small-town girl finds adventure, fame, and love in the big city: the evergreen plot gained new color in 1937, when Jackie Ormes made history as the first Black female cartoonist with a syndicated comic strip with Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, in which teenage Torchy Brown leaves rural Mississippi to sing and dance at the Cotton Club in New York City. Trading in a cow for train fare north and sitting in the “whites only” car to get there (18 years before Rosa Parks), Torchy was an independent, outspoken heroine who served up style with social commentary—and posed weekly as a paper doll with pinup proportions and a killer wardrobe. Like Ormes, who got her start at the Pittsburgh Courier covering boxing matches and wrote for the Chicago Defender under the androgynous moniker “Jackie” rather than her given name “Zelda,” Torchy defied expectations and broke barriers. In one strip that describes the “gentle beauty of her face,” she says, “Yes, I’m tired, Mother . . . I’m trying to find a future.”
“In burlesque, femininity is often presented in a demure, cutesy, sometimes hypersexual way. I knew after trying that on that that was not the route I wanted to go. So my persona was about bringing out the side of me that was bold, unapologetic, that was aggressive at times, that wasn’t afraid to demand attention and demand it in the way I wanted it. I think of Nina Simone: if you listen to her live [recordings], she legit tells people to sit down. I love that she wasn’t afraid to tell people how to experience her work. Po’Chop was a way for me to explore that. At least then, I considered Jenn Freeman to be an introvert, shy, didn’t want to take up space, shrunk. Creating Po’Chop was a way to give myself room to expand.”
Premiering August 19, Torchy’s Togs also develops the motif of brown paper in Freeman’s life and work—as both surface for text to be written upon and material for textile art. “In the video I take some of the dresses Jackie Ormes drew and blew them up and recreated them on brown paper,” she says. “That is another practice of mine, trying to retrace ancestors, retrace their handwriting. I’ve always been big on covering my walls with paper clippings, magazines that inspired me. That’s how I began my process, just clipping stuff, mapping out flowcharts and bubble charts on paper, and then, for some reason, it became super important to me it was on brown paper. I used to have a coworker who was really into origami, and she taught me how to make paper flowers, so I started folding paper flowers. During that time I was going through divorce, so it was a meditation. Wherever I was, I would sit and fold flowers.” The flowers became part of a performance, and in People’s Church of the G.H.E.T.T.O., Freeman covered the walls of Blanc Gallery with 6,251 open brown paper bags.
Torchy’s Togs, 8/19; Parts II-V released 9/21, 10/12, 11/17, 12/26; Litany presented in full 1/14/21; itspochop.com/litany.
