Through her blueswoman performances, Hunter embodied both a heteronormative working-class and an interior shaped by her strivings for a private life as a queer Black woman with global sensibilities. The feminine blues aesthetic she highlighted in her public career, complete with the sexually-charged songs and sultry performance style, was a labor requirement for her career, not a fixed part of her personal identity. Furthermore, Hunter eschewed the secrecy and mystery characteristic of blueswomen’s navigations of their personal and professional lives. Making these distinctions herself in public, she opted for a clear distinction between her “real” self, a queer Black race woman loner, and the entertainer she played for financial success.
Alberta Hunter’s two-faced strategy involved recognizing the rules of survival in a white supremacist society and playing the game to her advantage. Whereas many prominent Black women dissembled to protect their position as race women, Hunter’s claim to race womanhood arose out of her interiority. She successfully played a game of self-preservation and later archived it as one of race advocacy. However, she also invited readers in on the subterfuge, in part so we could know who she really was beyond the trickster character. Hunter’s life, characterized by her desire to live as a free woman on her own terms, is fertile ground for re-reading Black women’s history with more of an individual, existential lens. By making her archival process visible, Hunter carefully wrote herself into history as a lay journalist and queer Black race woman, worked with and against the limits of her biographer to ensure her story was told as she intended, and left a blueprint for how to witness and make space for how Black women want to be remembered.
Writing a trickster’s biography is one long game of hide and seek. You have to find what they have hidden in plain sight, respectfully interrogate what they say, and trust them to be the authority of their own experiences. Alberta Hunter’s biographer, and the person she used to make her archive public, was a journalist whose narrative did not always align with her recollections. For instance, he asserted that Hunter’s father had abandoned the family, though Hunter repeatedly told him that her father died shortly before her birth. Her biographer also failed on several accounts to rigorously engage with Hunter’s presentation of her collections, choosing instead to privilege a misreading of city archival records and thereby perpetuate longstanding stereotypes about Black family dynamics.