THE URBAN SCENE
_The Harlem School._--Before 1925 there was little in American fiction
about Negro life in northern cities. But when “the peasant moved
cityward” in the great sweeps of migration, books about the urban Negro
multiplied. The numbers of Negroes in northern cities grew by leaps
and bounds from 1916 on. Although various cities beckoned--Pittsburgh
with its steelmills, Chicago with its stockyards, Detroit with its
automobile factories--it was Harlem that became the Mecca for the
southern Negro, the West Indian, and the African. One historian of
Harlem states that it contains more Negroes to the square mile than any
other spot on earth. Harlem became a Mecca likewise for white pleasure
seekers from downtown and abroad, who, hunting the new thrill with the
desperate eagerness of the post-war generation, rushed to what they
considered a place of primitive abandon, of unfailing “joy of life.”
Cabarets sprang up like mushrooms; putting on a big time became a major
industry. In revolt against Victorian prudishness and repression, and
machine-age standardization, writers and artists escaped to dark Harlem
for vicarious joy, and discovered an “exotic, savage world,” only a
nickel’s subway ride from the heart of an over-civilized city. The
Harlem Boom was useful to Negro writers, who were influenced by the
growing race-consciousness of the “greatest Negro city in the world.”
Some accepted the downtown version of pagan Harlem as gospel, others
put in disclaimers, but all made eager contact with the literary world.
Carl Van Vechten’s _Nigger Heaven_ (1925) was the first novel to
exploit this newly discovered territory, and has remained the most
influential. The author, already known for sophisticated fiction, was
attracted by the high spirits and piquant contrasts of Harlem. Running
through the descriptions of cabarets, wild parties, and sensational
orgies is the story of Byron, an “intellectual” wastrel. He is loved
by Mary, a girl superior to the fast set, but he cannot resist the
wiles of Lasca, “a gorgeous brown Messalina of Seventh Avenue.” Byron’s
character cracks under the strain of fast living. His last gesture
is one of typical futility: in a fit of jealous and drunken rage, he
empties his gun into the body of his rival, who was already dead, while
the police approach.
_Nigger Heaven_ presented a setting and type of life that were
little known to American fiction except for _The Autobiography of An
Ex-Colored Man_. The gin-mills and cabarets, the kept men and loose
ladies of Harlem’s bohemian fringe, have surface accuracy and the
appeal of the unfamiliar. Van Vechten in a short space of time observed
closely. But like a discoverer, he was partial to exotic singularities.
That these exist does not validate the claim of the publishers that
“Herein is caught the fascination and tortured ecstasies of Harlem....
The author tells the story of modern Negro life.” Modern Negro life
is not in _Nigger Heaven_; certain selected scenes to prove Negro
primitivism are.
Claude McKay’s _Home To Harlem_ (1926) has for its setting the
speak-easies, buffet flats and “tonsorial parlors” of a pagan Harlem.
The characters are longshoremen, dining car cooks and waiters, and
members of sporting circles. Casual love affairs are their main
pursuits. Jake, an ex-soldier, recently returned from the World War,
meets and loses a marvelous brown charmer on his first night in
Harlem. His picaresque adventures and those of his cronies take up
the rest of the book, until he finds the long-lost beauty at the end.
Working conditions on the railroad are described with some grimness,
but _Home To Harlem_ lacks McKay’s sharpest protest. McKay’s nearest
approach to his poetry is in the ecstatic worship with which Jake looks
upon the abandon of the gay Mecca.
McKay’s _Banjo_ (1929) is related to the Harlem school of fiction,
describing the life of stevedores, tramps, sailors and panhandlers in
the “Ditch” at Marseilles. Ray, a vagabond intellectual from _Home
To Harlem_, does much of the talking; savoring color, joy and beauty
wherever he finds it, he is attracted to the primitive and violent
longshoremen.
Educated Negroes ashamed of their race’s intuitive love of color
... ashamed of Congo-sounding laughter, ashamed of their complexion
(bleaching out), ashamed of their strong appetites. No being ashamed
for Ray. Rather than lose his soul, let intellect go to hell and live
instinct!
To Ray, “A black man, even though educated, was in closer biological
kinship to the swell of primitive earth life.” Anti-bourgeois and
anti-imperialist, seeing the “civilized world” from the bottom, Ray
is nevertheless a racialist, not a radical. And such, in _Banjo_,
is the author’s position. He has been praised for dealing with the
proletariat, but the beachcombers here can hardly be so considered. It
is hard to see how reliance upon instinct will improve the lot of the
submerged and the defeated.
The Harlem stories in _Gingertown_ (1932) return us to blues singers,
“sweet backs,” entertainers, longshoremen, railroad men, barbers,
chambermaids, bellhops, waiters and beautiful “brownskins.” All of
these are called by McKay the “joy-lovers” of the belt, but their
stories do not reveal great joy. In “Brownskin Blues” and “Mattie and
Her Sweetman” McKay bitterly scores color prejudice among Negroes
themselves; in “Highball” he scores prejudice among the whites.
“Near-White” tells conventionally of the unhappy “passer.” In “Truant,”
a dining car waiter, married to a social climber, throws up his menial
job like a Sherwood Anderson hero. The stories are done with unabashed
realism, but they do not cover a wide range.
McKay’s stories of his native Jamaica in _Gingertown_ and his third
novel _Banana Bottom_ (1933), though realistic, have a pastoral
quality. A setting and way of life are skillfully and affectionately
conveyed in both books and we are spared preachments on “the problem.”
In _Banana Bottom_ especially, character development is uppermost.
The story of Bita Plant, educated in England, is simple and winning.
Minor characters like Squire Gensir, Jubban, Anty Nommy and Crazy
Bow are memorable, not idealized, but emerging with dignity and warm
flesh-and-blood humanity.
Although these are perhaps McKay’s best fiction, the greater part of
his work deals with American Negroes, particularly in Harlem. McKay has
denied that he was influenced by Van Vechten, stating that _Home To
Harlem_ was about completed before _Nigger Heaven_ was published. There
are points of agreement, however; McKay, like Van Vechten, believes
in “the inexpressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black
race,” and therefore seeks in the main the colorful aspects of “the
joy-belt.” There are differences as well. Having worked as dining
car waiter, porter and longshoreman, McKay knew the unskilled Negro
worker at first hand, not from an outside view. “I created my Negro
characters without sandpaper and varnish.” Because of this, his people
are not the quaint, artless innocents endeared to so many authors and
readers. They live hard lives, and are consequently hardened: they may
be ignorant, but they are not naïve. In dealing with the urban worker,
McKay opened a new field. But the Harlem he portrayed still seems too
close to the Harlem of a popular literary fashion. And the “inner
lives” he knows so well have not yet been shown with the depth of
understanding that one might expect of Claude McKay.
Rudolph Fisher portrays Harlem with a jaunty realism. _The Walls
of Jericho_ deals with types as different as piano-movers and
“race-leaders.” The antics of Jinx and Bubber are first-rate slapstick,
and though traces of Octavus Roy Cohen appear, most of the comedy
is close to Harlem side-walks. Fisher is likewise master of irony.
Miss Cramp, the philanthropist, who believes that mulattoes are the
result of the American climate, is caricatured, but the picture of the
Annual Costume Ball of the G.I.A. (General Improvement Association) is
rich comedy of manners. He deftly ridicules the thrill-seekers from
downtown who find everything in Harlem “simply marvelous.” Satiric
toward professional uplifters, _The Walls of Jericho_ still has the New
Negro militancy. Merrit is an embittered “New Negro”; he believes that
the Negro should let the Nordic do the serious things, and spend his
time in “tropic nonchalance, developing nothing but his capacity for
enjoyment,” and then take complete possession through force of numbers.
Fisher likewise shows the spirit of racial unity between the “dicties”
and the masses--“Fays don’ see no difference ’tween dickty shines and
any other kind o’ shines. One jig in danger is ev’y jig in danger.”
It is significant, however, that the wrecking of a Negro’s house in a
white neighborhood is the work of a disgruntled Negro, the villain of
the book.
But Fisher was less interested in the “problem” than in the life and
language of Harlem’s poolrooms, cafes, and barber shops. _The Conjure
Man Dies_ (1932), the first detective novel by a Negro, brings Jinx
and Bubber back to the scene to help solve one of Harlem’s grisliest
murders. A high-brow detective, an efficient Negro police sergeant and
an erudite doctor of voodoo are interesting new characters. The novel
is above the average in its popular field and was followed by a Harlem
tenement murder mystery solved by the same detective.
Before his untimely death, Fisher became one of the best short story
writers of the New Negro movement. “The City of Refuge,” containing a
good description of the southern migrant’s happy amazement at Harlem,
and “Blades of Steel” are first-rate local color of the barber shops,
dance-halls and cafes. “Vestiges” and “Miss Cynthie,” for all of their
light touch, have an unusual tenderness and fidelity to middle class
experience. Fisher was an observer with a quick eye and a keen ear, and
a witty commentator. At times his plots are too neat, with something
of O. Henry’s trickery. His Harlem is less bitter than McKay’s, but it
exists; and his realism, as far as it goes, is as definite as that of
any of the numerous writers who took Harlem for their province.
In Countee Cullen’s _One Way To Heaven_ (1932), Sam Lucas, a one-armed
gambler and vagabond, practices a racket around the churches,
pretending to be saved at revivals and thereby collecting money. His
testimony in a Harlem church converts Mattie, who falls in love with
him. Alternately vicious and sentimental, Sam makes Mattie’s life
miserable until his pretended death-bed vision of salvation brings
happiness to the religious girl. Mattie’s working for Constancia
Brown, an upper-class Negro, serves as an excuse to bring in the
artistic-bohemian Harlem. Cullen’s pictures of this set are almost
cartoons. He lampoons the back-to-Africa movement, the philistines who
form Book-Lovers’ Societies, the public reciters and the extreme New
Negro racialists. But Constancia, who refuses to “pass,” speaks the New
Negro creed:
Enjoyment isn’t across the line. Money is there, and privilege, and
the sort of power which comes with numbers but as for enjoyment, they
don’t know what it is.... I have seen two Negroes turn more than one
dull party, where I was longing for home and Harlem, into a revel
which Puck himself would find it hard to duplicate.
The best part of the novel is the portrayal of the Negro church. This
is fresher material, presented with understanding.
_Purpose Novels._ More realistic than his earlier fiction, _Dark
Princess_ (1928) by W. E. B. DuBois, is still part fantasy, and part
mordant social criticism. As editor of the _Crisis_, DuBois had urged a
union of the darker races of the world. _Dark Princess_ is an allegory
driving home the same message. In its last chapter Matthew Towns, the
Negro hero, flies to his homeplace in rural Virginia where his wife,
Kautilya, Her Royal Highness of Bwodpur, India, has just given birth
to a son, Matthew or Madhu. The son is acclaimed “King of the Snows of
Gaurisaukar, Grand Mughal of Utter India, Messenger and Messiah to all
the Darker Worlds!” Kautilya explains:
There had to be a Maharajah in Bwodpur of the blood royal; else brown
reaction and white intrigue had made of it a footstool of England. If
I had not borne your son ... Bwodpur and Sindrabad, India, and all the
Darker World [would have been lost.]
Less fantastic are the sections dealing with America, in which Matthew
Towns meets with galling insults, lack of opportunity on every hand,
and the smooth chicanery of Negro politicians. Two interesting
characters are Perigua, a Negro anarchist, and Sara, a striving Negro
woman, who plays the political game. There are plots and counterplots
in the manner of E. Phillips Oppenheim. DuBois speaks of the novel as
“rich and colored gossamer of a dream which the Queen of Faerie lent
to me for a season.” But the fusion of dream and social realism is not
achieved; the novel falls between the two.
A prominent figure in the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, Walter White has made use of the novel for social
protest. _The Fire In The Flint_ (1925) tells the tragedy of a
better-class, aspiring Negro family in a Georgia town. Bob Harper kills
two white men who raped his sister. Tracked down by a lynching mob, he
shoots himself with his last bullet. His brother Kenneth, a promising
young physician, is lynched in the ensuing hysteria for “assaulting a
white woman” whom he had been called in to attend. _The Fire In The
Flint_ contains sardonic comment upon the backwardness of the South.
The millhands of Factoryville have only “one strong conviction--the
inherent and carefully nurtured hatred of the ‘nigger’.” Like the
earlier apologists, White makes use of well educated heroes, avoids
dialect in the main, concentrates the injustices of the South into
fairly small compass, and has bitter contempt for the “cracker” and
the Klan. But _The Fire In The Flint_ has more of an impact than the
earlier books on lynching.
Although Walter White’s _Flight_ (1926) describes the Atlanta riot,
it is principally a novel about “passing.” Mimi Daquin, a New Orleans
octoroon of distinguished lineage, has an unfortunate love affair
with an upper class Negro in Atlanta, and goes to the North. Seeking
security for her child she marries a white broker, but remains
essentially unhappy. Her husband has no love for Negroes. Even as a
child, Mimi had believed that Creoles of Negro blood had something
“tangible, yet intangible ... a warmth, a delicate humanness” that
white Creoles did not have. As a woman, she believes that Negroes alone
“can laugh and ... enjoy the benefits of the machine without being
crushed by it.” A furtive trip to Harlem makes her wonder if her somber
cynical white companions, “whose unhappiness shone through all they did
or said,” were worth the price she was paying. When she hears a great
Negro artist singing spirituals, she is set free, and returns to her
own.
_Bourgeois Realism._--Continuing the earlier apologist tradition,
with propaganda a little less direct, certain novelists have set out
to prove the presence of a Negro upper-class, and to deplore the
injustices of its lot. Their standards are bourgeois; they respect
characters in ratio to their color, breeding, gentility, wealth and
prestige. “Realism” is perhaps a misnomer, if these novels are judged
by their plots, which are seldom very life-like; the realism is chiefly
in the settings.
Gertrude Sanborn’s _Veiled Aristocrats_ (1923) reveals the type. The
“aristocrats under the veil” are mulatto descendants of southern
aristocrats--“the souls of worthy men and women caught by a mad fate
in a prison of prejudice!” A sentimental white youth is brought into
contact with these fine people, especially with Carr McClellan, a
World War hero, and a great sculptor. Carr is beloved by the beautiful
daughter of a white financier. At the right time she is revealed to be
colored too, another “veiled aristocrat,” so everything ends happily.
There are many incredible coincidences. Though well-meaning, the author
is still condescending. Her protest concludes lamely: “Fact of the
matter, most of us are not giving our colored brothers a square deal.”
Zona Gale, introducing Jessie Fauset’s third novel, states
inaccurately: “Wherever the American Negro has appeared in fiction,
only the uneducated Negro has been pictured.” She is on surer ground
when she writes that Negroes of education and substance “merit the
awareness of their fellow countrymen.” In her own foreword, Jessie
Fauset reveals her bent to “the colored American who is not pressed too
hard by the Furies of Prejudice, Ignorance, and Economic Injustice,”
and who has his own caste lines.
As naturally as his white compatriot he speaks of his “old Boston
families,” “old Philadelphians,” “old Charlestonians.” And he has a
wholesome respect for family and education and labor and the fruits of
labor ... sufficiently conservative to lay a slightly greater stress
on the first two of these four.
_There Is Confusion_ (1924) has as central characters Joanna Marshall,
an ambitious dancer, whose “success and fame were instant,” and
Peter Bye, a brilliant, sensitive medical student. The home-life of
middle-class Philadelphia receives some attention, but the love story
receives far more. The “problem” is never far off. In a pageant, Joanna
represents America. Forced by great applause to unmask, she speaks:
I hardly need tell you that there is no one in the audience more
American than I am. My great grandfather fought in the Revolution, my
uncle fought in the Civil War, and my brother is ‘over there’ now.
Joanna refuses to marry a Negro whom she found “charming and
sympathetic ... [but] too white. She did not want a marriage which
would keep the difficulties of color more than ever before her eyes.”
_Plum Bun_ (1929) is greatly concerned with “passing.” Believing
that “the great rewards of life--riches, glamour, pleasure--are for
white-skinned people only,” Angela goes “over the line.” After a
disillusioning liaison with a rich white man, “which left no trace on
her moral nature,” she falls in love with Anthony Cross, and fears to
reveal her secret. But love will find a way: he reveals that he too
is of Negro parentage, “passing” because his father was lynched by a
mob. So now they can marry, as in _Veiled Aristocrats_. The beautiful
brown sister, for whom life has been evenly pleasant, likewise marries
happily at the book’s end.
_The Chinaberry Tree_ (1931) is again concerned less with the
unspectacular drama of the Negro middle class, than with the melodrama
of the octoroon. The two heroines are illegitimate. Laurentine is the
daughter of Aunt Sal and Colonel Halloway, who loved Sal devotedly but
could not marry her. In contrast to Laurentine’s love affair, there is
a great deal of confusion in the life of Melissa, who is saved only in
the nick of time from marrying her half-brother. There are valuable
glimpses of Negro community life in Red Brook, the characters ranging
from Mrs. Ismay, a Bostonian of “innate gentility,” to young pool-room
sports. But the complications springing from the “mystery of birth”
make what could have been realism into old-fashioned romance. Olivia
Cary, who dominates _Comedy, American Style_ (1933) is obsessed by the
need to be white, not out of shame for her blood, but because of the
things which the white world possesses. She persecutes her husband and
drives her daughter into a loveless marriage and her son to suicide.
The bitter comedy of race-prejudice is ultimately blamed. With random
flashes of power, _Comedy, American Style_ is without satiric drive,
and manages to be sentimental instead of tragic.
Jessie Fauset has been called by one critic the American woman most
worthy “to wear the mantle of Jane Austen’s genius.” This comparison
is not apt: Jane Austen’s satiric approach to her people and setting
and her neatly logical plots are not evident in Miss Fauset’s four
novels. Miss Fauset is sentimental, and regardless of her disclaimers,
is an apologist. She records a class in order to praise a race.
Favorite characters are chauvinists, condemning “the dastardly American
whites,” believing that Negro blood is “the leaven that will purify
this Nordic people of their cruelty and their savage lust of power.”
Having courageously set herself to chart the class of Negroes she
knows, Jessie Fauset, at her best, succeeds in a realism of the sort
sponsored by William Dean Howells. Too often, however, instead of
typical Negro middle class experience we get the more spectacular
“passing,” and exceptional Negro artists and cosmopolitans. Miss Fauset
has written:
To be a Negro in America posits a dramatic situation. The elements of
the play fall together involuntarily; they are just waiting for Fate
the producer to quicken them into movement,--for Chance the Prompter
to interpret them with fidelity.
But her novels rely too much upon Fate and Chance.
_The Tragic Mulatto Passes For White._ Nella Larsen’s _Quicksand_
(1928) covers a great deal of ground, from Georgia to Chicago, Harlem,
Copenhagen, and finally a small southern town. Upper class Negroes
are her main characters, and their snobbishness is revealed (both
consciously and unconsciously). Helga Crane is buffeted about, but
does not attain tragic stature. The attempt to reveal a self-centred,
harassed personality is commendable, but is not helped by scenes like
the one in which the sophisticated heroine attends a church meeting,
and there, overwhelmed by the frenzy, begins to yell like one insane,
and to weep torrents of tears. She felt “a supreme aspiration toward
the regaining of simple happiness ... unburdened by the complexities
of the lives she had known.” In _Passing_ (1930) Mrs. Larsen is anxious
to set before us the refinement and good taste of wealthier Negroes.
Clare, who “passes,” is unhappy, and frequently visits Harlem. “You
don’t realize, you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be
with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.” Says the
author’s spokesman, “they always come back.” Discovered in Harlem by
her Negro-hating husband, Clare falls from a sixth story window--death
solves her problems. Her friend, Irene, who would not “pass,” lives in
contrast a happy, respectable life.
White novelists rushed into print with a different version. Vara
Caspary’s _The White Girl_ (1929) and Geoffrey Barnes’ _Dark Lustre_
(1932) are so alike in essentials that they should be considered
together. Both of the heroines are repelled by Negro life and Negro
suitors. Both because of their exotic beauty become artistic models,
and both have tragic love affairs with white men. In _The White Girl_,
Solaria’s secret is revealed by the coincidental appearance of her
brown-skinned brother. Desperate, and believing that she is growing
darker, she drinks poison. In _Dark Lustre_ Aline’s dilemma is solved
by having her die in childbirth, but her whiter baby lives to continue
“a cycle of pain.” Both books advance the old superstitions. Solaria
at a wild party is thus explained: “It was the colored blood in her,
the heritage from some forgotten ancestor, that released these warm
wild winds of passion.” Aline is thus explained: “There was too much
nigger in her to follow a line of reasoning when the black cloud of her
emotions settled over it.” It is all so sad.
Hallie Dickerman’s _Stephen Kent_ (1935), on the other hand, takes
up the cudgel for her mulatto hero’s superiority, but he is made too
superior, winning prizes and acting nobly at every turn. There is
much mystery about “tainted blood,” about the reappearance of colored
blood “unto the third and fourth generations.” A sympathetic plea
for justice, _Stephen Kent_ is still hard to credit. _Imitation of
Life_ (1933) by Fannie Hurst was well meaning, perhaps, but it, too,
perpetuated old stereotypes. Peola longs to be white: “I won’t be a
nigger! I won’t be a nigger!” Her black mother is philosophical about
it: “It may be mixed up wid plenty of white blood ... but thin out
chicken gravy wid water an’ it remains chicken gravy, only not so
good.” When Peola meets with problems:
Lord git de white horses drove out of her blood. Kill de curse--shame
de curse her light-colored pap lef’ for his baby. Chase it, rabbit’s
foot. Chase de wild white horses trampin’ on my chile’s happiness....
It’s de white horses dat’s wild, a-swimmin’ in de blood of mah
chile....
It is no wonder that, longing to be stable, Peola “passes” and
marries on the other side. Delilah, with a “rambunctious capacity for
devotion,” is the old contented slave, brought up to date, worshipful
of her white Miss Honey Bea, to whom her drudgery has brought wealth.
The statement is clear: black Negroes, contented with serving and
worshipping whites; mixed Negroes, discontented, aspiring, and
therefore tragic. Alas, the poor mulatto!
We have thus seen that the mulatto who “passes” has been a victim
of opposing interpretations. Negro novelists urge his unhappiness,
until he is summoned back to his people by the spirituals, or their
full-throated laughter, or their simple sweet ways. One of Wallace
Thurman’s characters says:
My dear, you’ve been reading novels. Thousands of Negroes cross the
line and I assure you that few, if any, feel that fictional urge to
rejoin their own kind.... Negroes who can and do pass are so glad to
get away they probably join the K.K.K. to uphold white supremacy.
But this is heresy: a mystical bond must be shown, the cutting of which
produces grief, since the white world is “pallid and to be pitied.”
White novelists insist upon the mulatto’s unhappiness for other
reasons. To them he is the anguished victim of a divided inheritance.
Mathematically they work it out that his intellectual strivings and
self-control come from his white blood, and his emotional urgings,
indolence and potential savagery come from his Negro blood. Their
favorite character, the octoroon, wretched because of the “single drop
of midnight in her veins,” desires a white lover above all else, and
must therefore go down to a tragic end. The white version is nearly a
century old; the Negro version sprang up recently. Both are examples of
race flattery. Divided between conflicting attitudes, the poor mulatto
finds added unhappiness in his interpreters.
_In Opposition._ But the idealism seen in the apologistic, the
bourgeois, and the “passing” novels found a gleeful critic in George
Schuyler, of the H. L. Mencken school of satirists. _Black No More_
(1931) tells how Dr. Crookman discovers a drug that will turn Negroes
white. Negroes rush to use it, even the chauvinists who had preached
pride of race. Schuyler lampoons both sides, the professional
“race-men” who were tremendous gainers from the “problem,” and the
spokesman of the Knights of Nordica who, though totally ignorant,
discussed over the radio “anthropology, psychology, miscegenation,
cooperation with Christ, getting right with God, and curbing
Bolshevism....” Telling blows are landed on statisticians, rhetorical
windbags, pretentious strivers and hat-in-hand Negroes, but _Black No
More_ is farce rather than satire, in the last analysis--provoking more
mirth than thought. It was, however, refreshingly different. _Slaves
Today_ (1932) is an attack upon the mistreatment of the natives in
Liberia by the upper-class Americo-Liberians. Schuyler’s narrative
sketches in such magazines as _The American Mercury_ are told with
terseness and point.
Wallace Thurman is likewise the “devil’s advocate” in his two novels.
Emma Lou in _The Blacker The Berry_ (1929) is another defeated heroine,
not because she is an octoroon, however, but for precisely the opposite
reason. Well-educated, she is unable to get suitable positions and
social life because she is black. She goes around for a time with the
“New Negro intellectuals,” but is ill at ease with them. Scorned and
rejected, she sinks deeper and deeper into drabness. Thurman thus puts
his finger upon one of the sorest points of the Negro bourgeoisie, its
color snobbishness, “its blue vein circle,” “aspiring to be whiter
and whiter every generation.” His descriptions of Harlem rent parties
and the like are of Van Vechten’s school, but the theme of his novel
deserves attention. Unfortunately the writing is slipshod, and the
steady decline of his central character is less tragic than depressing.
His heroine is as morbidly sensitive about color as any tragic
octoroon, and shows as little fight.
_The Infants of The Spring_ (1932) shows Thurman taking less seriously
his coterie of Harlem artists. Young in years and achievement, they
flatter themselves as “a lost generation,” and like Van Vechten’s
Byron, seek escape in dissipation. One cynical character speaks:
Being a Negro writer in these days is a racket and I’m going to make
the most of it while it lasts. I find queer places for whites to go in
Harlem ... out-of-the-way primitive churches, side street speakeasies
and they fall for it. About twice a year I manage to sell a story....
I am a genius in the making. Thank God for this Negro Literary
Renaissance! Long may it flourish!
Debunking the Bohemian futility of the intellectuals, Thurman is just
as severe on the bourgeois idealists and the various race-messiahs.
_Infants of The Spring_ is at times peevish, at times angry, crudely
written, and not always well thought out. But like Thurman’s first
novel, it had something to say.
_Black Sadie_ (1928) by T. Bowyer Campbell is an irritated
southerner’s attempt to debunk the Harlem that lured jaded Bohemians.
From “corn-field nigger” Sadie rises to be model for the New Negro
exaltation of _Africa victrix_, and the toast of artistic New York.
Even in her affluence, however, Sadie is a kleptomaniac. After causing
a murder, she returns to happy Virginia. “Easy come, easy go, niggers”
are Campbell’s closing words. Campbell’s satire has point, but he is
too vexed to get it across. It is obvious, also, that the stereotype he
prefers is that of the comic menial.
_Dark Surrender_ by Ronald Kirkbride (1933), after describing South
Carolina plantation life in the manner of Julia Peterkin, delivers an
attack upon the “New Negro.” Having deserted a wife on the plantation,
who promptly becomes a Scarlet Sister Mary, Tom goes to the North,
graduates from Harvard with athletic and scholastic honors, visits
Europe, and becomes a great poet. But he gives it all up as “imitation
of the accomplishments of the white man,” and returns to the soil. To
the white owner of the plantation he states that Negroes
who have aspirations and yearn to be great ... are fools in the sense
that they are not true negroes.... To live from day to day in simple
enjoyment, with no cares nor worries, with no great attempts, to
be something which you are not ... that is life, the true life....
The negro has his place in the present, in the simple life, with no
desires but of the body, with no yearnings for the future nor for the
past....
Maxwell Bodenheim, with a naturalist’s approach, could not see in
Harlem only a place of joy-filled Negroes. In _Naked On Roller Skates_
(1931) he shows the harsher, truculent aspects of Harlem dives. In
_Ninth Avenue_ (1926) he shows the seamy aspects of Manhattan. His
white heroine in this book marries a Negro, a better man than any of
the Ninth Avenue set. Contrary to O’Neill’s _All God’s Chillun Got
Wings_ this intermarriage is not doomed to failure. In _Deep River_
(1934) Clement Wood does not have the regret, disdain, or anxiety with
which most southern novelists look upon Harlem and the “New Negro.”
This chronicle of the marriage of a noted Negro singer to a white woman
is frankly done, exploiting a subject generally taboo. But it is hardly
worthy to stand alongside Wood’s earlier novel _Nigger_.
_Summary._ The fiction of urban realism was valuable for introducing
new characters in a new milieu. Whether created by Negro or white
authors, the characters are race-conscious, and at times militant. But
the old stereotypes by no means disappeared. Carl Van Vechten has a
noted magazine editor comment on the possibilities of Negro literature:
Nobody has yet written a good gambling story; nobody has gone into the
curious subject of the divers tribes of the region.... Nobody has ever
done the Negro servant-girl, who refuses to live in. Washing dishes
in the day-time, she returns at night to Harlem where she smacks her
daddy in the jaw or else dances and makes love. On the whole I should
say she has the best time of any domestic servant in the world....
The Negro fast set does everything the Long Island fast set does ...
but it is vastly more amusing ... for the simple reason that it is
_amused_.
Most authors took this to heart. What resulted was a search for the
exotic and an insistence that Negroes were peculiarly marked by a
“joy of living.” Dance-halls, rent-parties, gambling, sprees, casual
love-affairs crowded out more serious realism. The cabin was exchanged
for the cabaret, but Negroes were still described as “creatures of
joy.” Even Negro propagandists urged this, seeking to find some
superior “racial gift.” To look for the true life of a Negro community
in cabarets, most often run by white managers for white thrill-seekers,
is like looking for the truth about slavery in the off-time
banjo-plunking and capers before the big house. Focusing upon carefree
abandon, the Harlem school, like the plantation tradition, neglected
the servitude. Except for brief glimpses, the drama of the workaday
life, the struggles, the conflicts, are missing. And such definite
features of Harlem as the lines of the unemployed, the overcrowded
schools, the delinquent children headed straight to petty crime, the
surly resentment--all of these seeds that bore such bitter fruit in the
Harlem riot--are conspicuously absent.
Bourgeois realists did “apprise white humanity of the better classes
among Negro humanity,” but this is a value apart from the values of
fiction. Their upper-class characters too often seem to serve as
window-display. “Passing for white” is made a much more acute and
frequent problem that it is in ordinary Negro middle class experience.
With discerning satire, Martha Gruening sums up the argument of Negro
bourgeois realism:
I am writing this book because most white people still believe that
all Colored People are cooks called Mandy or Pullman porters called
George--but they aren’t. They think we all live in cotton field cabins
or in city slums, but actually some of us live on Edgecomb Avenue or
Chestnut Street. We don’t all shout at Camp Meeting or even all belong
to the Baptist or Methodist church. Some of us are _Episcopalians_.
If you were privileged to visit our homes (which you aren’t, for we
are just as exclusive as you are) you would find bathtubs, sets of
the best authors and etchings! That’s how refined we are. We have
class distinctions, too.... The daughters of our upper classes are
beautiful and virtuous and look like illustrations in _Vogue_ ... far
more attractive than white girls of the same class, for they come in
assorted shades.... Joy isn’t on your side of the line, nor song, nor
laughter.
There is certainly place in American fiction for treatment of the Negro
middle-class. The precarious situation of this small group could well
attract a realist of vision, not only to satirize its pretense, but
also to record its dogged struggling. But to approve it in proportion
to its resembling white middle-class life, is not the way of important
realism.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What earlier fiction dealt with the Negro in northern cities?
2. How is the Van Vechten tradition similar to the plantation tradition?
3. List the authors who consider the Negro to be a “creature of joy.”
4. Why have the novels of “bourgeois realism” been called “prospectuses
to sell the white world the idea of a Negro middle class?”
5. Why are the opposing attitudes to “passing” examples of race
flattery?
6. What northern cities with large Negro populations are as yet
untreated by novelists?
7. What is race-chauvinism? Point out examples in the fiction
discussed.