When she died in 1974, Holt left a record of the accomplishments for which she had so carefully prepared. She later studied voice at the American Conservatory of Music in Fontainebleau, France, and taught music in the Los Angeles public schools. She herself composed more than two hundred pieces, although only two, Negro Dance, Opus 25, no.1, and The Sand-Man, seem extant. She co-founded the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), a guild of trained performers, composers, and teachers of what was defined as ‘classical’ music. As the first African-American woman to earn a Master’s degree in music, she was well equipped for these positions. An influential reviewer and critic, her columns on classical music ran for years in the Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News, and in the 1960s she hosted ‘Nora Holt’ s Concert Showcase,’ a weekly music program on a Harlem radio station. In her later years, she looked like a portrait of a Negro lady, complete with hat, veil, and gloves. Douglas, an elder in the African-American Methodist Church, and Grace Brown Douglas the girl who became Nora Holt seemed destined for a life of respectability and achievement. She reinvented herself constantly, which she could do because she was constantly on the move.Ģ Born Lena Douglas in Kansas City, Kansas, perhaps in 1885 (the years 18 are sometimes cited) the daughter of Reverend C.N. She was a study in contradiction, a woman whose multiple careers and identities remain difficult to reconcile. A conservatory-trained musician on the one hand and a cabaret singer on the other, Nora Holt impressed some people who met her as a proper New Negro matron, while to others she was a jazz-age goddess. Lasca Sartoris is more caricature than character and does not remotely capture the complexities of the woman on whom she is based. 1 The name Nora Holt glimmers through histories of the Harlem Renaissance: as a guest at the era’s legendary parties, including the one given in honor of the publication of Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues, as a principal in the period’s most tabloid-ready scandals, and as the model for Lasca Sartoris, the seductress of Carl Van Vechten’s notorious novel, Nigger Heaven.

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