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SPEAKER_01: Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica. This month we're talking about mischief makers, oddballs, chameleons, and nonconformists, queens of quick wit. It's 1939. A black and white poster hangs on a busy street corner. A woman looks out from it, arms crossed defiantly. A string of pearls hangs around her neck. Two rings, one on each hand, catch in the light. A headline announces, magician and cartoonist extraordinary, in her modern, marvelous, matchless, merry-making march through mystery land. If laughing hurts you, stay at home. Her name is plastered in big block letters, Ellen E. Armstrong. When Ellen was born in 1914, she became the sole heir of the era's premier magic team, the Armstrongs. Ellen's father, Professor John Hartford Armstrong, was known as the king of the colored conjurers. He'd been honing his craft since he was a teenager, when he apprenticed with a French magician touring the American South. He picked up sleight of hand easily, and soon took his own show on the road, first with his brother, and later as a solo act. Magic was a hybrid form of entertainment, less venerated than cultural pursuits like music and rhetoric, but more respected than traveling vaudeville acts. Ellen's father, John Hartford, was one of just a handful of black magicians at the time. Many of his peers had roots in other kinds of performance, like minstrel and vaudeville acts. But John knew his magic could stand on its own. With his wife and organ accompanist, Lily Bell, John developed a magic act that blew audiences away. It catered explicitly to black people, who were often excluded from segregated magic shows. The Armstrongs toured the country, performing at black colleges and churches. When the most common tour route for magicians, the Lyceum Circuit, banned them from performing because of a racist policy, they helped pioneer a black Lyceum Circuit instead. Resonating with his own community was integral to John's routine. In one of his tricks, he passed a picture of Frederick Douglass around the crowd. At one point, it would suddenly disappear from a guest's hands and reappear in a frame on stage. John would use the trick to talk about Douglass's escape from slavery. This was the world Ellen was born into. By the time she was six years old, she had her own act. Ellen would totter up and down the aisles during set changes, touch her hand to an audience goer's forehead, and define what they were thinking about the person sitting next to them. Whether she really hit the mark, or whether she was just too cute to ignore, Ellen's blend of psychic comedy magic was an instant hit. As a teenager, Ellen developed an act called Chalk Talk. She'd begin by telling a story through a series of marks on a chalkboard. Then, as she built up the narrative, she'd add more and more lines to the picture, drawing out fantastical cartoons from nonsensical squiggles. She let audience members come up, add a few lines, and incorporate their work into her story. And then, to top it off, she'd flip over the board upside down, revealing an entirely new drawing. With John and Ellen conjuring tricks, and Lily Belle playing organ to accompany them, the Armstrongs took the world by storm. They toured up and down the East Coast, traveled to Cuba, and even visited Europe. Their tagline, going fine since 1889, if laughing hurts you, stay at home. But the business came to a halt in 1938, when John, the King of Conjurers, suddenly died of a heart attack. Ellen was 25 years old and had just finished college. She had so much of her life ahead of her, and she chose to take up her father's mantle. With a quarter decade of magic under her belt, and $8,500 worth of stage props, Ellen transformed herself into the mistress of modern magic. Ellen wasn't naive. It was rare and dangerous for a woman to travel solo. It was even riskier for her to run a traveling show alone as a black woman in the 1940s. But Ellen pulled it off. She refined her craft, pulling out classics like The Miser's Dream, a never-ending coin trick, and showstoppers like The Puzzling Parasol. She transferred her chalk talk act over to crayons and paper so kids in her audience could take her completed drawings home as souvenirs. And she paid homage to the legacy her father had worked so hard to build up, with her own flair, of course, switching out Frederick Douglass's photo for one of Joe Louis, a famous black boxer. Ellen ran the same circuits she had with her parents, bringing her show to black audiences. She married a minister from North Carolina at some point in the 1940s, but she never had children and always ran her show solo. She retired in 1970 and spent her final years in a nursing home in South Carolina. She passed away in 1979. To this day, many of the magic tricks Ellen helped invent remain classics in any magician's repertoire. Her 31 years of magic-making, most of them as the only female solo magician in the country, were an incredible feat. Though she seemingly vanished from the historical record in the decades after her death, academics today are working to pull together the puzzle pieces of the Armstrong family legacy. Though, of course, we might never know the full story. A great magician never reveals her secrets. All month, we're talking about mischief makers. For more information, check us out on Facebook and Instagram at Wamanica Podcast. Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. Talk to you tomorrow.
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