Interracial Affair With Canada Lee
In 1934, she had begun a love affair with black actor-boxer Canada Lee despite the threat of miscegenation laws. They had lunch uptown in Harlem at the then new restaurant Franks where they could maintain their secret relationship. By the 1940s, Lee was a Broadway star and featured in the nation-wide run of the play Native Son. But the only restaurant in Washington D.C. where they could eat together was an African restaurant named the Bugazi. Unlike so many of her lovers, he didn't ask for money, even when his nightclub The Chicken Coop had a difficult time. When Crosby's brother Walter expressed his dismay at their relationship during a dinner in the early 1940s, Caresse was offended, and had little contact with Walter over the next 10 years. Crosby and Lee's intimate relationship continued into the mid-1940s and contributed to her world-view. Crosby wrote a never-published play, The Cage, transparently based on their relationship.
Read more about this topic: Caresse Crosby
Famous quotes containing the words affair, canada and/or lee:
“For universal love is as special an aspect as carnal love or any of the other kinds: all forms of mental and spiritual activity must be practiced and encouraged equally if the whole affair is to prosper. There is no cutting corners where the life of the soul is concerned....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“This universal exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the keeper of a menagerie showing his animals’ claws. It was the English leopard showing his claws.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.... Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
—Harper Lee (b. 1926)