Locke emerged in May 1924 relatively unscathed from his conflicts with Barnes and Jessie Fauset. Barnes seemed afraid to attack Locke publicly: now that their names were linked in Opportunity, which had published his article, even he realized he would look ridiculous attacking a fellow contributor and the ghost editor of the volume. Fauset fumed in private or with her female friends, but Black respectability protected Locke once again.
By contrast, Locke was not well protected emotionally. In early June, William, his young lover, left Washington to work on a boat as a waiter. Neither Locke nor William was enthusiastic about the idea, but William took the position because it offered a chance to travel and mature somewhat. This removed the primary source of Locke’s emotional turmoil, because William refused to allow Locke to control his life or his affections. After months of fruitless struggle between them, Locke’s nerves were frayed and he was glad to see him go. He also soured on ever finding a romantic interest to fill the emotional void in his life. Why Locke had invested so much in that unrewarding relationship was unclear, even to Claude McKay. “You know some parts of your first letter mystify me rather. I thought I was persuading you all the time not to take that Washington disappointment so badly but I never reckoned on you entering upon experiences of ‘diffused emotion.’ ” Locke had begun traveling almost every weekend to New York, staying at the YMCA in Harlem, and visiting emerging gay nightclubs and cabarets where he could meet young men. Nevertheless, as he confided to McKay, these random sexual encounters were neither emotionally satisfying nor creatively stimulating.1
Even as Locke fell apart without William, there were some benefits. With William out of the way, Locke was freer to develop his relationships with young writers in Harlem and elsewhere who sought educational and professional advancement. That Locke adhered to such a philosophy is clearly indicated by the educative or paternalistic nature of his relationships with such young writers as Eric Walrond, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes over the next three years. To the extent to which he helped them to become mature, educated, and accomplished artists, he could rationalize the pursuit of his own sexual satisfaction with them as making a race contribution. If he elevated the level of accomplishment these young men reached, then, in the long run, their careers and more broadly Black achievement would spiral upward. Such male-male relationships could be reciprocal in their production of artistic excellence for the race even if they were not reciprocal in desire.
Often, in practice, this still produced more difficulties than satisfaction for Locke. Sometime in late 1923 or early 1924, Locke had developed a close, perhaps even a sexual, relationship with Eric Walrond. It exemplified Locke’s educative approach. “You ask me to write you regarding my plans,” Walrond wrote to Locke on June 4. “In the fall I must be at school. As regards writing, I am not going to look at that novel until I get back to the city. I am not really worried about the problem of revision—that I know is something I must do leisurely and in conjunction with my rising (I hope you’ll pardon the epithet) powers.” Locke had chastised Walrond for being lazy and failing to follow through to completion his many short stories, novels, and other writing projects. He also advised the young Jamaican on his best career moves. But such efforts did not result in increased intimacy between them, and the pressure to excel may have had the opposite effect. Walrond promised to spend a weekend with Locke in June, but canceled the day he was supposed to show up, citing nervous tension and depression. “I do not think,” he wrote, that “it would be fair to you, nor would I be doing myself justice, to come down to Washington in this high-strung, unnatural, morbid, discontented state of mind. For it seems strange, yet it is true, that ever since I have known you I have not been really myself.”2 The pressure to meet Locke’s expectations sometimes made many want to distance themselves from him.
Mercifully, Cullen did come to Washington and spend a weekend with Locke in June. But Locke and Cullen were not seriously attracted to one another. Locke received what meager sexual favors he obtained from Cullen, because he mentored Cullen psychologically. Ironically, Locke served as a go-between and model of emotional stability to Cullen, who struggled desperately with his own unrequited love. Cullen was a comrade, perhaps an occasional sexual partner, but not a lover. Additionally, the corpulent Cullen lacked the slender build that Locke desired in lovers.
Even before William’s departure, Locke had renewed his correspondence with the most elusive and attractive of the Harlem writers, Langston Hughes. Remarkably, Locke and Hughes still had not met. After Hughes disappointed him, Locke swore off any further correspondence, but Cullen—returning the favor to serve as a go-between—facilitated their reconciliation. Cullen had received a letter from Hughes early in 1924 that stated he wanted to resume his education; but this time he wanted to attend a Black college, possibly Howard. Cullen encouraged him to contact Locke, who exchanged a couple of cautious but cordial letters with Hughes. Then, suddenly, a February 2, 1924, telegram from Hughes ratcheted up the intensity of their relationship. “MAY I COME NOW PLEASE LET ME KNOW TONIGHT WIRE LANGSTON HUGHES.” Locke did not immediately answer the telegram. Two days later, Hughes explained. “Forgive me for the sudden and unexpected message I sent you. I’m sorry. I should have known that you couldn’t begin in the middle of the term and that I wasn’t ready to come anyway. But I had been reading your letters that day and a sudden desire came over me to come to you then, right then, to stay with you and know you. I need to know you. But I am so stupid sometimes. However I am coming to Howard and I want to see you and talk to you about it.”3
Why did Hughes, inclined to avoid Locke, suddenly change course? Probably, a number of considerations coalesce to create a sense of urgency in Hughes. He was a young man without means. Without somebody’s help, he could not obtain an education. Locke had already proposed to pay his way abroad: perhaps he could live with Locke in Washington and obtain tuition and room and board. While the wily side of Hughes saw Locke as a means to an end, the artist also was attracted to the persona Locke had created in his letters of a Black aesthete able to introduce Hughes to the life of art and writing as an ideal. Hughes had never encountered anyone with such a romantic commitment to the life of art; his desire to “know” him was partly a desire to know himself as an artist and writer. Having experienced his first homosexual encounter and then having fallen madly in love with Anne Coussey, a middle-class Anglo-African, Hughes’s “sudden desire” to come to Washington and “stay with you and know you” may have expressed a need to learn something more about his own complicated sexual identity by meeting Locke.
Locke weakened and decided to take a chance and propositioned Hughes. “Perhaps you will come to Howard—that emboldens my desire to have you with me … here you would have no expenses whatever if you could collaborate with me in my work and help me with my writing. May I suggest this?” Locke’s needs went beyond ordinary “research assistance,” as he explained. “I am humbly and desperately in need of a companion—several hoped—for things have failed utterly. My only recourse is a German friend [Rudolph] who with difficulty would fit into the local situation. Countee has put my moral problem to me beautifully and with precision—‘Please keep a racial heart’—he says. I know I should—the question is, can I—may I?”4 When Hughes failed to answer Locke’s provocative letter, Locke sent Hughes a Howard catalog, advising that he too would be in Paris that summer, but avoiding any proposal to get together. He also wrote Hughes about his love for the romantic sights of Paris, but emphasized that he would be occupied with other people and business that summer.
Locke also made some connections for Hughes. He secured an invitation for Hughes to lunch with Albert Barnes and Paul Guillaume and visit the latter’s Galerie. Once in Paris, Hughes found Barnes distasteful, but loved the gallery and its collection of African art. Most important, Locke announced that he wanted to publish Hughes’s best poems, especially “Danse Variation,” which Cullen had shown him, in “a special issue of the Survey Graphic devoted to Negro life.” Prominent publication in such an issue would, of course, benefit Hughes. All of these maneuvers showcased that Locke was a valuable patron to Hughes who would be rewarded by the association. It nicely deflected attention from Locke’s emotional neediness. The tactic worked. Early in June, Hughes wrote that he would try to remain in Paris until Locke arrived. Locke remained cool in his letters to Hughes, even as he anticipated the opportunity to “spend a few days in Paris with you before you flit.” This casual line was just a pose, since Locke knew he had a competitor.5
That same month, Jessie Fauset wrote Hughes asking him to remain in Paris until she arrived in October. It was no secret that Jessie Fauset always beamed radiantly whenever she had Langston Hughes in her midst. Of course, her age—she was over forty—his perpetual absence from New York, and her professional and sexual relationship with W. E. B. Du Bois complicated whatever romantic relationship she might forge with Hughes. But when her relationship with Du Bois deteriorated that spring, and her novel became a publishing success, she took a leave of absence that fall, perhaps already planning on pursuing Hughes. Romantic attention from Hughes would allow her to regain her self-esteem, play the older, wiser lover, and perhaps find her muse. “You can take me to all the dangerous places and I can take you to all the beautiful ones,” she wrote in April.6
Even more important, Hughes, in May, looked forward to her arrival. To Harold Jackman, a close friend of Countee Cullen, Hughes confided that he regarded Jessie as “a woman of charm, my own brown goddess.”7 That news, undoubtedly communicated to Locke by Cullen, could not have made Locke happy. Despite all of his assets, he was still less desirable to Hughes than an older, late-Victorian woman. What was “an old girl,” as Locke sometimes called himself, to do? Get to Paris as soon as possible! But Locke had many responsibilities to fulfill before he could leave New York.
Paul Kellogg, the editor of the Survey Graphic, had approached Locke and Charles S. Johnson at the Opportunity dinner about doing a special issue of his journal, Survey Graphic, on the younger writers’ movement. It may have been Kellogg’s idea to connect this literary awakening to Harlem, the vibrant northern neighborhood of Manhattan that had become the ideal destination of Blacks migrating out of the South and the West Indies during the 1910s. It is not clear whether Kellogg envisioned them as co-editors of what became known as the Harlem number or as having different titles and functions. But Kellogg planned meetings to include both Locke and Johnson, because Johnson was already a known quantity—a skilled editor and confidant of many of the young writers Kellogg wanted in the issue. Moreover, Johnson was perhaps the most knowledgeable person in New York about the sociological landscape of Harlem.
But practically, Johnson was already editing a major magazine with only a tiny staff and traveled constantly to gather information and represent the Urban League. A turning point came when Kellogg planned a critical meeting for the three of them on Saturday, April 19, but Johnson had to cancel due to a business trip. Kellogg went ahead with the meeting with Locke alone. The Survey Graphic editor was getting anxious, because he had planned the Harlem number to appear in the fall, but as yet had no plan or outline for the issue.8
Locke came up by train that Friday and arrived the next morning at the Survey Graphic’s offices at 112 E. 19th Street. At noon, Locke and Kellogg lunched at the Civic Club, then returned to the Survey Graphic offices, where Kellogg asked him to prepare an outline of the issue. Locke returned home, penned the outline, mailed it, and then learned on May 10 that Kellogg and his staff liked it and, with certain modifications, would use it to begin to contact contributors, most of whom Locke had suggested.9 From then on, Johnson had a diminished role, and Locke was clearly the guest editor of the issue.
Rumors spread that Locke had pushed Johnson aside. It would not be surprising if Locke had used his meeting with Kellogg to convince him that he was the best man to edit the Survey Graphic number. Less tightly scheduled than Johnson, Locke also was able to devote his full attention to the issue. Given that the Survey Graphic staff already possessed considerable sociological and marketing expertise, Kellogg may also have felt that his greater need was for someone who brought a completely different aesthetic talent to the project. Kellogg and Locke also hit it off personally, for they subsequently remained friends and collaborators. Most important, Locke’s outline promised to make Kellogg’s Harlem number one of the most original investigations of Black life yet published. Although Johnson had pioneered the use of a race magazine to market Black literature, the leitmotif to the main story of each issue was the social problems encountered by Negroes. By contrast, Locke’s outline emphasized the literary and cultural history of Harlem in such articles as “The South Lingers On,” “The Tropics in New York,” “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” “The Negro Brings His Gifts,” and “Jazz at Home.” Moreover, most of the authors he proposed—Rudolph Fisher, W. A. Domingo, Eric Walrond, Rebecca West, Arthur Schomburg, and J. A. Rogers—were writers or historians, not the usual Negro authorities. By putting poetry, belles-lettres, and historical anthropology ahead of sociological reports, Locke privileged the agency of African Americans and minimized Progressive-Era objectification of the Negro as the sick man of American democracy. Not only had he separated himself from other race sociologists, but he had also discovered the theme of his work for the rest of the 1920s—that in places like Harlem, a distinctive, contemporary, and urban African American culture had emerged. Nothing in the prior issues of Opportunity suggested anything as complex as Locke articulated in his outline.
Locke’s metaphor for the special number—“The New Negro”—also was compelling, especially the way Locke planned to employ it in the issue. Of course, New Negro was a concept that had been around in African American newspapers, books, placards, and pamphlets since the 1890s—usually referring to a generation of Blacks born after slavery who rebelled against the stereotypes imposed on ex-slaves. Booker T. Washington had seized the term to title his 1901 book that heralded a new, more economically self-sufficient Negro, who rejected the paternalistic arrangements started under slavery and embraced self-dependence and entrepreneurship in a laissez-faire economic world to define a new identity for themselves. In the late 1910s, the New Negro gained a militant label when Black migrants, who migrated to northern cities during the World War, fought back when attacked by Whites who sought to drive them from urban Black communities. By 1924, the New Negro was also associated with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and its demand for Blacks to pursue a separate, independent economic and political agenda in the United States and plan to move “Back to Africa” to create a great African nation. By appropriating the term, Locke sought to evoke all of these prior references but to add a new one—the idea the New Negro was a generational awakening in the city, especially in Harlem, where the streams of the uneducated and educated of the race came to Harlem out of a sense of opportunity, not flight from oppression. As Locke stated in “The New Negro,” a synopsis of his introductory essay: “The North meant freedom to the elder generation; the city means opportunity to the younger.” In one sentence, Locke changed the argument of the issue from being about “the Negro problem” to being about the consciousness of a younger generation of Negroes in the city.
This New Negro conceptual frame allowed Locke to keep his promise to Hughes to put the younger generation “out front” and make youth the principal embodiment of the “New Negro” attitude. Locke pushed “youth” in part because of the Sonnenkinder orientation he had imbibed in Berlin, that the youth were the deliverers of a new spiritual nationalism, whether in Germany or America. Locke also was sexually infatuated with young writers and wanted to make young male bodies icons of the Negro Renaissance just as they had been idols of the Italian Renaissance. Even more politically, by focusing on youth, Locke interrupted the dominant racial narrative in America of Negroes as an undifferentiated mass. Youth forced White and Black ideologues to add a new concept—generation—to the prevailing lenses of race and class used so extensively by Du Bois and such other Black radicals as Hubert Harrison and Chandler Owen. Youth symbolized the possible renewal of Black culture by a new generation of young, gifted, precociously expressive writers—not politicians, street corner preachers, or labor organizers. Idealism replaced a materialist analysis of the Negro and brought with it the possibility of transcendence of America’s race problem rather than further submersion in it.
The shift to culture was consistent with what Kellogg had defined as the orientation he wanted in the Survey Graphic, as opposed to the more rigorously sociological Survey Mid-Monthly that Kellogg also published. Since 1922, he had turned the Survey Graphic into a popular venue to provide educated, upper-middle-class urban readers with “graphic” portraits of ethnic peoples. Previous numbers were on gypsies and Mexicans, the latter an issue, guest edited by novelist Katherine Anne Porter, that sought to capture the spirit of the Mexican Revolution rather than provide an exhausting sociological analysis of why it had occurred.
Once Locke was in charge of the issue, though, he was more responsible than he wanted to be for securing the contributions, especially as his summer travels loomed.10 Locke had difficulty getting fresh material for the issue. Kellogg urged Locke to “ask people to get their manuscripts in by June 10.”11 By the end of June, only one contributor from the thirty contacted, Albert Barnes, who of course had already written his contribution, had sent it in. Locke leaned on the notoriously tardy Eric Walrond to get started on his essay on West Indian culture and chided Arthur Schomburg, who had difficulty writing in English, to transcribe his largely oral insights into Afro-European history into written notes for what became “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” Locke’s new angle on the Negro brought with it the challenge to get creative writers and self-taught historians to produce trenchant cultural reporting on a deadline. A long, frustrating process had just begun.
Even in the area he knew best, poetry, the going was tough. Most poetry on hand was by James Weldon Johnson and other older and previously published authors. Locke leaned on Cullen, to whom several of the New Negroes regularly sent their latest material, to gather material for him. Cullen, in turn, showed these items to Locke, who then wrote and requested them from the authors. But that did not guarantee new material for the Survey Graphic. Locke read Hughes’s “Danse Variations,” and then wrote to Hughes. “Countee Cullen showed me Danse Variations and I love it so much. I would like to use it for a special issue of Survey Graphic I am editing.”12 But months earlier, Hughes had sent the poem to Augustus Dill, who had taken over Jessie Fauset’s duties at the Crisis, and he planned to publish it that summer. By the end of June, Locke had precious few new poems on hand.
Another significant hurdle was to find sympathetic White observers to portray Harlem as a cultural entity with something to add to America and the world. Here, Locke’s own contacts helped most. He tapped Melville Herskovits for an anthropologist’s view of Harlem, but since he was a relatively unknown student of Franz Boas at this time, Locke needed a more well-known observer to validate Harlem’s significance. Rebecca West’s name surfaced, but she was a contact of Walter White’s, and Locke hesitated since they were still on less than good terms after the Barnes conflict. Kellogg suggested Locke “take Mr. White into your confidence about the special issue we are getting up” in order to get him to enlist West in the enterprise. Locke failed to act.
Locke had a real stroke of luck when Kellogg proposed to use German-born artist Winold Reiss to illustrate the issue. Reiss had done strikingly beautiful portraits of Mexican revolutionaries and peasants for the special Mexican issue of the Survey Graphic in May 1924. Apparently, Kellogg contacted Reiss about whether he would be willing to do a series of portraits of “Harlem Types” that could be used by the magazine. Reiss jumped at the idea, but here again there was a catch. He needed some contacts and some sitters, and once again, that is where Locke came in. “You write,” Kellogg replied to a Locke letter early in June, that “‘I shall make New York again June 11th as agreed upon. Could Mr. Reiss in the interim however look up a few types? I will write him if you say so.’ My impression is that Mr. Reiss was largely going to lean on you and Mr. Johnson and people you could get to cooperate to find him the types. Why don’t you drop him a line and keep his interest simmering.”13
Locke did not know many “types,” a euphemism for “authentic, full-blooded Negroes,” usually found among the working class. Reiss had left New York City by mid-June to spend the summer in his Woodstock home. With few written contributions on hand and no artist around, Locke left for Europe. The best that could be hoped for was that over the summer the contributors would at least start their articles, and Locke could urge them to completion once he returned from abroad. When that would be was also unclear. Initially, he had applied for a fall leave of absence to pursue the African research trip he had planned the previous year and was ready to launch in Egypt through the auspices of George Foucart and the French archaeological mission. He planned to meet with Foucart in the south of France, after visiting Hughes in Paris, and then, if conditions were favorable, to proceed to Egypt, again, for the fall excavation season in 1924. Locke also had received an invitation to meet Belata Heroui, the Ethiopian ambassador, to further pursue Locke’s plan to interest Ethiopia in sending a contingent of students to Howard and allowing a mission of Howard students and faculty researchers to go to Addis Ababa. With such a full plate of possibilities awaiting him, Locke planned for a long stay. He packed thoroughly and also arranged to sublet his apartment to a group of students for the summer to help cover his expenses since the Olympics had driven up prices in Paris for the summer. Once Kellogg finally released him from further efforts to squeeze contributors, Locke sailed in early July for England.
Locke’s first destination was London, where he planned to visit the Empire Exhibition. He wanted to see the African artifacts that the British had brought out of colonial Africa, particularly Nigeria, and the representation of the Africans in the exhibit. Since seeing the Barnes Collection, Locke hungered to see more African art. Once again, a visit to England confirmed his hostility to the British: in racial and colonial terms, they continued to provide the most devastating and degrading images of Africa and African civilizations in Europe.
Upon arriving in Paris, Locke continued to delay his visit to Hughes. Perhaps he too was a bit anxious about the meeting, in case they might both be disappointed. So, keeping plans he had made before sailing, he met up with Melville Herskovits for a visit to Paul Guillaume’s gallery. This constituted a minor drama in itself. Locke surprised Guillaume by arriving at his gallery on July 12. Guillaume, after learning of Locke’s “lack of gratitude” toward Barnes, had promised Barnes to refuse to allow Locke to visit his gallery again. But Locke showed. Because he arrived with Herskovits, whom Locke introduced as a very important anthropologist and student of Franz Boas, Guillaume allowed them both in, but followed them around seething with anger. When he noticed them looking intently and approvingly at a particular work of art, he sighed under his breath, and mumbled to himself that it was not an important work of art. Locke, of course, wandered around blithely, showing the splendid items of African art to Herskovits as if he owned them. After the visit, Guillaume wrote to Barnes that if Locke ever returned to his gallery, he would give him a tongue-lashing about his treatment of Barnes. But he had not had the courage to do it when he had the chance in the fall of 1924, and Locke would not give him another chance.
Finally, Locke took the subway to Montmartre, the working-class Parisian district he did not like particularly and sought out Langston Hughes. After climbing the steps to an attic on the Rue des Trois Freres, Locke knocked on the door, and answered, “Alain Locke,” when Hughes queried through the closed door, “Qui-est-il?” Hughes opened the door, quickly dressed, and took Locke down to a little bistro near the Place Clichy where Locke bought him lunch. According to Arnold Rampersad, “At lunch Locke talked effortlessly of many things, but in particular of editing a special issue, on the Negro question, of Paul Kellogg’s influential magazine Survey Graphic.”14 Afterward, they made plans to get together again.
Locke and Hughes spent the next two weeks together, going sightseeing and enjoying entertainment as Locke introduced Hughes to an elite cultural side of Paris that he had not visited before. Locke took Hughes to the Louvre, to the Opera Comique, to the ballet Taglioni chez Musette, and to such beautiful gardens of Paris as the Parc Monceau, whose lush vegetation and secluded benches had made it a favorite of Locke’s mother. Locke and Hughes also broadened their intellectual contacts while together. Hughes met Rene Maran for the first time, and Locke and Maran renewed their debate over Locke’s portrayal of French colonialism. Locke had been elected a foreign member of the French Colonial Academy, and it is likely that he took Hughes to some of the receptions hosted by the Academy. Near the end of July, Hughes wrote to Cullen ecstatically: “Locke’s here. We are having a glorious time. I like him a great deal. I only wish we could be together all summer. I’m enjoying my last two weeks in Paris more than any others because Mr. Locke is here.”15
A man of learning like Locke did not want just sexual rewards, he wanted to fall in love, and that was precisely the effect of Locke’s romancing of Hughes. On Hughes’s last day in Paris, the two of them took a “trance-like walk up the Champs Elysees.” At the Arc de Triomphe, they turned east, walked down the avenue Foch, with its sumptuous lawns and townhouses, and entered the Bois de Boulogne, Paris’s largest and most beautiful park. On a hot, August afternoon, the heavily wooded Boulogne, with its two lakes and marvelous waterfall, had a magical effect on Locke. After a brief evening stop back at Hughes’s rooms, Locke, rather than his protégé, had fallen in love.
The next day, August 9, Hughes left on a trip to Italy with friends he had met at Le Grand Duc, the jazz club run by the African American aviator Eugene Bullard where Hughes had worked during his stay in Paris. Hughes agreed to meet Locke later in Venice, but Locke could not wait until then to continue his courtship. He opened up his heart to Hughes in a letter written the day after he departed. “Today the atmosphere is like atomized gold, and last night you know how it was—two days the equal of which atmospherically I have never seen in a great city, days when every breath has the soothe of a kiss and every step the thrill of an embrace. I needed one such day and one such night to tell you how much I love you, in which to see soul-deep and be satisfied—for after all[,] with all my sensuality and sentimentality, I love sublimated things and today nature, the only great cleanser of life, would have distilled anything. God grant us one such day and night before America with her inhibitions closes down on us. And then perhaps through prosaic hours and days we can keep the gleam of the transcendental thing I believe our friendship was meant to be.”16 Apparently, at the end of that night, Hughes had granted Locke some undisclosed intimacy—a long hug, a kiss, or something more—and afterward, Locke was eager for a lot more.
Arnold Rampersad suggests Locke’s letter stunned Hughes, who received it after a week of sun and frolic with his friends in Desenzano, the village near Lago di Garda in northern Italy. While he had developed an intimate friendship with Locke, he had not fallen in love with him. One can readily understand how Hughes felt: Locke was crowding him, pushing him into a sexual relationship that he did not want. Moreover, the request for further intimacy carried a threat. Locke might withdraw his offer to subsidize Hughes in his quest for a college education. He responded with innocence, ignoring for the moment the reality that he wanted Locke’s financial help without having to put out sexually. “I like you immensely,” Hughes wrote to Locke, “and certainly we are good ‘pals,’ aren’t we? And we shall work together well and produce beautiful things.”17 Hughes proposed to continue their friendship without sexual involvement, but that was not what Locke had in mind. For him, friendship did not exclude—indeed, at its highest level required—a sexual relationship. Of course, such behavior was not unique to Locke or to the gay community. W. E. B. Du Bois expected sexual and intellectual companionship to go hand in hand when he was attracted to women, especially those, such as Jessie Fauset and Georgia Douglas Johnson, whom he helped.
But the story is more one of pathos and unrequited love than naked exploitation. Locke did not want a prostitute—he wanted a companion, a partner, who lived with and inspired him. His financial “carrot” emerged out of his insecurity that as an aging gay man he could not attract a young man of quality like Hughes without some leverage. What he longed for, of course, was for Hughes to love him. Hughes had granted Locke some minor sexual request after the latter revealed the depth of his emotional desperation. “Remember,” Locke wrote afterward, “that it was only Thursday that out of the almost suicidal depths of despair and discouragement you gave me your brotherly hand of help and hope. My thanks are as profound as the need was—my hopes as high as my renewed ambitions.” Such an expression of need is painful to read. It was also degrading, something Locke acknowledged. “Please insist on work—hold yourself dear and do not let my great passion cheapen you,” even as he insisted on its sexual, indeed procreative nature, “and let our association breed beautiful things, like children to hallow the relationship.”18
Here was another aspect of Locke’s desire. He knew the Survey Graphic project would challenge him as a writer: Locke had already failed to turn in the draft of the introductory essay. With Hughes as his live-in companion, Locke believed he would have found his muse—“how I marvel at your creativeness,” he had written to Hughes just weeks before. What Locke wanted was a complex relationship that would address all of his emotional and creative needs. Of course, sex would be a part of it, and there Locke knew he asked for something Hughes did not want to give. But desperate for affection, Locke lowered his sights, held out his financial proposal, and asked, almost demanded, what he knew might “cheapen” Hughes. Locke was sophisticated enough to realize, after the fact, when he had come on too strong. “All the nicest things seem to be happening after you have left,” Locke wrote to Hughes after silence had followed his previous confessional letter. “Shall I catalogue them—this shall be in the epic not the lyric strain—was the last letter too lyric? (forgive me).”19 Hughes decided to wait until Locke reached Italy.
Locke hurried to complete his professional responsibilities in France before heading off to Italy and Hughes. He had dinner with Belata Heroui and the following day had a session alone with Ras Taffari, the future Haile Selassie. Locke asked Taffari the same question he had asked Heroui in 1923: did the Abyssinians consider the American Negroes their brothers? According to Locke, Taffari responded by saying that “a man should always be able to come home.” This rather ambiguous but positive answer spurred Locke on to suggest the remainder of his plan, especially the idea that Ethiopian students should come to Howard University and study.
Several years later, Locke admitted that he did not have much success with this recommendation, as most Ethiopian students who came to the United States went to White colleges and universities. Potentially more promising was his meeting with George Foucart. The details of this meeting are sketchy, but apparently Foucart delivered the news that French archaeological operations were temporarily on hold because of the upsurge in nationalism and violence in Egypt, especially over the Carter excavation. Suddenly, Locke was freed from what had been the most promising research possibilities of his trip, the return to Egypt and his engagement in real archaeological research. But he was also freed to spend more time in Italy in pursuit of Hughes. Locke left shortly after his Foucart meeting for Venice.
Locke arrived in Verona just after the first of September. Again, the nearly idyllic whirlwind of sightseeing ensued. According to Rampersad, “They visited the tomb of Juliet and sent Cullen a postcard. In the late summer mist, Venice was a spectacular vision; the Rialto, the Doge’s Palace, and the Bridge of Sighs were far more vivid than he had ever imagined they would be. They rode in gondolas on the canals, and visited the house where Wagner lived when he wrote Tristan, and where he died. Joining the throng of summer tourists, they scattered pigeons in the Piazza San Marco; they listened to the municipal band and watched fireworks burst over the water.”20 This time something went wrong. Hughes became “restless” as he listened to Locke talk on and on “about Titian and Tinotoretto, Caravaggio and Canaletto, this palazzo and that ponte.” Hughes got tired of “Locke talking, always talking,” and, as he recalled some sixteen years later in his autobiography, The Big Sea, “began to wonder if there were no back alleys in Venice and no poor people and no slums. … So I went off by myself a couple of times and wandered around in sections not stressed in the guidebooks. And I found that there were plenty of poor people in Venice and plenty of back alleys of canals too dirty to be picturesque.”21 Afterward, Hughes had made up his mind not to live with Locke in Washington.
Locke and Hughes, as would be much clearer in 1940 than in 1924, held to two different theories of culture. Hughes felt his art would testify to the dignity, the genius, and genuineness of the poor of any culture, but especially the African American. For Hughes, culture began and ended with the masses. Locke, on the other hand, believed that although art grew out of the soil of the working-class experience, the best art and culture was that which evolved through discipline, learning, and purification to become sophisticated art. Both agreed that culture came from the bottom up. They differed on what the artist did to that folk art to make it art. Hughes believed the Black writer should listen to the life, speech, and pronunciation of the working class, and try to reproduce it, at least its thought. For Locke, culture was a theory of progress, of movement upward from the specificity of the folk experience to artistic forms of greater complexity and greater universality.
But it does not completely explain why Hughes reacted the way he did to Locke. For all his elitism, Locke had walked those back streets and dark alleys as a student at Oxford, long before Hughes did. Hughes was not so naive not to realize that there were dirty, stupid, untrustworthy, poor people in every country, and he did not need to leave Locke to realize this. What must have been occurring in Locke’s conversation was a representation of who the Venetians and the ancient Italians were. Locke narrated how beautiful they were, how they had turned their suffering and struggles into fine art, and potentially how that differed from how American Negroes responded to their troubles and struggles. Indeed, there is a long tradition among Black intellectuals of lamenting that Negroes had not created the kinds of really fine art out of their struggles—with the exception of the spirituals—as the peasants of France and Italy did. What likely rubbed Hughes the wrong way is that such a view was accompanied by a denigration of the African American poor by comparison, the very people that Langston Hughes felt closest to.
This talk was not divorced from the politics of homosexuality, either. When Rampersad writes about this encounter, he situates it in the literary context of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a book that Hughes picked up afterward and read on the way back home. That story of an elder homosexual’s ultimately fatal infatuation with a younger boy probably did resonate with Hughes’s own feelings. But the book that epitomized what Locke was doing was Stones of Venice, in which John Ruskin narrated how he led his students on a tour of the art of Venice in precisely the ways Hughes recollects that Locke did that summer of 1924. It was a continuation of the seduction scenario of Paris. But in Venice something clicked for Hughes that his homosexual tradition was not that of the aesthetes but the masculinist tradition of same-sex love with sailors and other rough men. After hunting out the “common people” in Italy, Hughes would eventually explore and find his poetic inspiration among “common people” that fall away from Washington, D.C., away from Locke.
Hughes became tired of Locke in a way that would be experienced by others who were otherwise attracted to him. This was the tragedy of much of Locke’s romantic life—that he was inept at expressing his love for people in a compelling way. He exposed to Hughes, as Rampersad puts it, “what it might be like to live with Locke.”22 By 1924, lecturing to other people had become a way for Locke to avoid intimacy and defend himself against emotion, in this case, his mounting fear of rejection by Hughes. Locke felt that if he expressed his love directly, he would be rejected, because Hughes did not love him. So Locke just talked, hoping that the talk would seduce him, but it drove him further away, because it was a monologue.
The poet found a way to get out of having to return to Washington with the critic for the beginning of Howard’s fall semester. On a train to Genoa, Hughes’s passport and all of his money were stolen while he slept alone in third class. He could not, therefore, enter France. Locke, exasperated no doubt with this stupidity, lent him a “few lire,” Rampersad writes, and “hurried on to be sure to catch his own boat back to the United States. Perhaps his ardor had cooled, as well; certainly, he made no further attempt to help Hughes.”
Locke left Langston Hughes in Genoa, not to catch a boat home, as he led Hughes to believe, but to take a train to his hideout for the next three weeks—San Remo, a tiny seaside town on the Italian Riviera. That Locke left Hughes stranded for the month of August 1924, in Genoa without money, while Locke lived and worked in a wonderful hotel on the beach of San Remo suggests Locke had had enough. In fact, he had gotten what he needed from Hughes. After a spring and summer of writer’s block, Locke was able finally to pen the first draft of his essay, “The New Negro,” that became “Enter the New Negro,” in Survey Graphic. Locke’s summer romance had achieved its desired effect of inspiration for a new statement about what it meant to be a Negro in 1920s America. Indeed, that Locke was able to separate from Hughes even though he loved him represented a step forward in Locke’s maturation.
Locke also had separated successfully from another ally and friend even before meeting up with Hughes. In a letter, now lost, that surprised Charles S. Johnson, Locke severed his professional relationship with Johnson. Locke struck deep at his patron’s integrity by claiming that Opportunity was exploiting the young writers of the movement because, as in Locke’s case, most of them were not paid for their submissions. Of course, Locke’s accusation was preposterous—most magazines did not pay for poetry submissions—but it hurt Johnson, who wrote back trying to repair the breach. In many cases, not the least Locke’s, as Johnson explained, the editor had introduced Black writers to other magazines and book publishers who had paid them for their work. “If you had not added the point to your note by affirming and emphasizing the deliberateness of a momentary exasperation, warranted perhaps by the aspect of our common circumstance but quite unlike you—but what can I say? I agree with your sentiment regarding pay for contributions, regarding our great indebtedness to you, and regarding the justice of getting for you support in your efforts for us to the amount of the first figure mentioned by you, and even more if possible. But I am keenly pierced by the sudden tone of your letter and the unfortunate texture of your arguments.”23
Johnson’s confession, while Locke was in Paris, that Opportunity magazine could not pay him to write a series of articles on the Negro in Europe and Egypt probably triggered Locke’s summer outburst. Without that guarantee of funds, Locke could not afford to spend the fall in Egypt and would have to return to Howard. That was not Johnson’s fault, as he noted in his letter: “It may seem to you an utterly useless process but we must be able to convince our contributors that the European materials (which make remarkably good feature material for the magazine) have a direct relation to the local problems of Negroes. I wish we were a well-endowed literary magazine. I do not yet count the issue entirely hopeless.”24 Johnson had been the only person to give Locke the publishing outlet to re-create himself as a public intellectual, whose writing gained a general educated audience among African American readers because of that exposure. But Johnson had also needed Locke as a commodity whose credentials and exquisite prose gave Opportunity the intellectual cachet to compete with the Crisis. Johnson also had used Locke to deliver a stinging blow to Jessie Fauset in such a way that Locke became the fall guy. Locke also may have been angered by Johnson’s decision to publish Rene Maran’s letter that criticized Locke’s positive assessment of French colonial attitudes in “Black Watch on the Rhine.”25 It is tempting to speculate whether Johnson decided to publish the letter as a payback for Locke’s stealing from Johnson the control of the special Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic the preceding spring. But regardless of motivation, Locke viewed the publication of an embarrassing letter as a public indictment of his judgment. Johnson, Locke believed, did not have his interest at heart.
Locke’s letter to Johnson was probably just a rude way of freeing himself from a stifling relationship. The pattern had emerged in Locke’s dealings with Barnes and would repeat itself throughout his life with older, more powerful men. Locke had bonded with Johnson as a patron when he lacked a mature public identity, but it was only a matter of time before Locke would have the Oedipal tug to reject Johnson as an unreasonable, overbearing father figure. But the separations from Barnes, Hughes, and now Johnson coincided with a spurt of productivity for Locke as a writer, lasting roughly from the summer of 1924 through the spring of 1927. Separating from people he needed but who could not extend unqualified acceptance and love stimulated him to express an independent vision in his writing and editorial work. Locke rebelled against patrons, Black and White, and as well as lovers, because of that he gained psychic strength to become the New Negro himself. And he had the strength to choose a place to write that was his kind of place. Of course, there was more to San Remo than simply the memories of a kiss with Hughes or an imagined betrayal by Johnson. The coastal town of San Remo was a Mediterranean paradise beloved by tourists in August and September for its cool, ocean breezes. Locke arrived in San Remo at the height of the tourist season, suggesting that he had made reservations long in advance of his arrival. That Locke chose San Remo at its most bustling suggests that what he liked was its energy, its flamboyant beach antics by native boys and tourist crowds, as a place where this often lonely intellectual would not feel alone.
San Remo might seem an odd place for an African American intellectual to write an essay on the New Negro in America. Indeed, we might go so far as to suggest it is a frame clash—between the conceptual frame that to write persuasively about the Black community one should be embedded within it, on the one hand, and the cosmopolitanism framework that Locke was a transnational man of the world who was not just a race man, on the other.26 That clash was audibled in Carter G. Woodson’s quip the year before that Locke was enjoying himself in Europe and not hurrying to Africa. But Locke was trying to transcend the stereotypical logic by which the Negro was commonly defined as a broken minority in America and replace with one in which the Negro is the result of a dialogue between Europe and Africa. That dialogue was seen as a clash—and a ridiculous one at that—by Zora Neale Hurston, who later would quip that it was ridiculous for Countee Cullen to go to Europe to write Black poetry. But in addition to the silencing of the reality that Black homosexuals enjoyed much more freedom to think and write in Europe than in homophobic America is a more profound gesture; the dismissal relegates the Negro to a spiritual ghetto that Locke is desperately trying to escape.
Going to San Remo was precisely what he had been suggesting as valuable in the earlier essay “Cosmopolitanism and Culture”—that a dialogical relationship exists between worldliness, the life of the wanderer, the ability to see oneself from the vantage point of a new setting, on the one hand, and being embedded in one’s own culture, one’s own history, on the other. San Remo became a rich opportunity to skate across the contradiction into a new appreciation of what is actually valuable about Black people, of the beauty of Black people. While dozens of White American writers and artists are flocking to Europe to find their muse, Locke is hanging in San Remo to unleash his—and try to see Black people as a world people, not a broken American minority. Escape to San Remo was critical to being able to return to America with something new.
Italy, of course, had been the last nation to experience a renaissance of the impulse that Locke felt so strongly in Venice during those days he walked and talked with Hughes. That impulse was the desire to live one’s life in search of aesthetic perfection. Florence presented the closest model of a city that celebrated its artists like warrior heroes and renowned their struggles with form like accounts of soldiers on the battlefield. I suspect Locke chose San Remo as his urban muse, not Florence, because he sensed he needed to distance himself from the canonical center of Western art in order to imagine a Black version of it. He was after something elusive—a new view of Negroes that would change his own negative view of them. Northern Italy, especially around San Remo, had a peasant culture whose rich heritage allowed Locke to see the poor Black southerner as a culture bearer. Italian culture narrated their poor as noble and triumphant and that offered Locke a model for seeing the Black poor as propulsive and beautiful. San Remo allows Locke to escape all that negative programming he had gained from his mother and the Black Victorian tradition that denigrated poor Black people as uncultured and worthless. Never in America would the Black “peasant,” really ex-slave, be portrayed as noble and beautiful, as the Italian poor are regarded in Fellini’s Roma. In San Remo, for the first time, Locke was able to overcome his writer’s block and sketch in writing a compelling image of a New Negro that was not fundamentally elitist, that embodied “the Negro.” As he informed Paul Kellogg, “This to ease your mind somewhat about the Harlem Issue. I have been settled down here for quite a little working on my mss and the other manuscripts, and from the way things are going can assure you of bringing home a full kit.”27
Locke’s struggle for an autonomous voice helped him retell the story of the Negro as the struggle for self-determination in his earliest typed draft of “The New Negro.”
The life history of the Negro in America falls into three phases when we consider basic causes: In the first of these his fortunes were determined largely, almost solely by the attitude of white Americans towards him, with the Civil War and Reconstruction he passed into the second phase where though in a way still affected by public opinion, he was primarily at the mercy of conditions, in the clutches of the environment so to speak. With the Great War and the migration, the third phase of relative independence of conditions has commenced; the Negro today is moving under the control of his own objectives. It is not that he still does not have to pay an extortionate and heavy toll to conditions, but mass-movement is nevertheless under way. The spirit of self-determination has struck fire, so that while public opinion and social conditions may still press and modify, they cannot any longer play the primary role. It is a question now of what the Negro wants, and the price of effort, sacrifice and self-direction that he is willing to pay for it. Public opinion used to lead, and has controlled, now at best it must follow and understand. Even the so-called leaders of the Negro group are no longer controlling factors—the most significant movements of the last few years have taken most of them by surprise,—the more progressive have merely fallen into line with what they have not initiated. The Negro is not only changing habitat, he is changing his habits, it is not merely a question of continued progress but a question of a new psychology.28
Here was the New Negro—a “psychology” of “self-determination” to “move under the control of his own objectives” and not be controlled or directed by the objectifying frames of others. In Europe, being mobile himself, Locke broke out of the old frameworks and saw the migration of hundreds of thousands of Black southerners into the urban North as that historical moment when the Negro became a subject.
For Locke, geographical change was the result of a changed mentality in the Negro. “The wash of this tide on the beach line of the northern and mid-western industrial centers, the influx of migrants into a center like Harlem is to be explained more in terms of a strange new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to risk more on a chance of improvement of conditions than a blind flood started by the currents of war industry, or the pressure of poor crops and the boll-weevil or increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South, however contributory any or all of these factors may have been. Something more than the old loyalties and ambitions and compensations stirs today in the average Negro mind.” Remarkably, writing from San Remo, and after his romantic tussle with the working-class-minded Hughes, Locke could acknowledge that poor southern Negroes who embraced disjunction, chaos, and unpredictability by throwing themselves headlong into the completely foreign world of northern and urban Black communities were now redefining the Negro. It was not the Black intellectuals who were leading; they were followers. The Black poor were the leaders—the first Black modernists of the renaissance issuing a challenge to the rest of the race: “The question is no longer what whites think of the Negro but of what the Negro wants to do and what price he is willing to pay to do it.” 29
In one fell swoop, Locke had rewritten modern African American history. Gone was the sense one always received from reading Du Bois that the history of the Negro since the Civil War had been a long history of degradation at the hands of Whites. Locke’s history was a narrative of reinvention and focused on the most elusive of attributes that emerged as a triumphant positive—the ability of Black people to transform their futures by reacting creatively to their present. In Europe that summer Locke was freed to fashion a different Negro history, in his own image, as the triumph of subjectivity over all those forces that tried to control Black people—and him. Rather than an object buffeted about by more powerful others, the Negro was, like him, able to invent a new identity out of tragedy, just as he had remade himself after his devastating experience of racism at Oxford. Europe remained important because the key to the New Negro was his or her mobility, an eager leave taking of the South that reflected a mental freedom that transcended oppression. The African American was the quintessential transnational, moving between different nations, which the South and the North virtually were, just as Locke had ranged back and forth across the Atlantic constructing a new mobile intellectual identity. Locke, ultimately, could identify with the migrating peasant because that’s what he was. His personal narrative gave him a template for conceptualizing the psychological liberation for the Negro. He was unloved. So was the Negro. Both would remake themselves as crucially important to modern American history.
The Great Migration was Black subjectivity emptying through space—not just an idea or discursive trope, but a concrete manifestation of African American agency through the spatial turn. Black people changed “what time it is,” by moving through space; and by chronicling it as revolutionary, Locke showed the spatial creativity of the New Negro—turning segregation into aggregation by moving away. Usually, outmigration was conceived of as a random disruption of community. But in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York, the Georgia Negro met the South Carolina Negro and the already settled New Yorker and Chicagoan, and formed a new, truer community. People who came from different spaces created a new space of Blackness in the North that welcomed the refugees from Jim Crow America. And Locke was a refugee himself, migrating intellectually through space by returning intellectually to Blackness by embracing his transnational mobility as itself a sign of the New Negro. He moved, and so did they—unlettered, untutored, poor, and distraught African Americans, West Indians, and Africans—and found themselves in one another. From San Remo, Locke could feel the Negro migrant as a lower-class version of himself, someone rebelling against the social death America intended for them by leaving and then, remarkably, finding a truer home away. Here, the notion of home itself was revised—not the place where one’s ancestors were buried, in the rural South, in Africa, but in a new urban America. Moving was not fleeing—it was reinvention of subjectivity in Harlem, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, which were not refugee camps but new triumphant examples of traversing space and making place.
Subjectivity was the first breakthrough of San Remo, for Locke was able to see the Negro as subject transcending oppression by navigating space. Class was the other. For the first time, Locke saw the Black masses as the progressive agents of change in America. “The New Negro is essentially a mass-made advance,” he opined in “The Negro Mind,” another draft written in San Remo that was incorporated into “Harlem,” eventually the lead article in the Survey Graphic.30 This was a long way from “The Role of the Talented Tenth” that he had penned right after his PhD. Given that Locke was one of the most elitist educated men in America, the question worth asking is, was there something beyond being in San Remo with its Europeanized view of the poor that gave him greater empathy and understanding of the historical power and agency of the working-class Negro?
The summer love affair in Europe with Hughes had also helped to catalyze this breakthrough. Falling in love had awakened Locke’s passion and connected him with someone else and increased his capacity for empathy, which always enabled his ability to write. But the second part of the summer’s love story was just as important to his new writing. Having found love and then realized it was unrequited, he had had the self-love to move on without it, and be free. It was a metaphor of what the New Negro faced and did. Rather than lament that tragedy or be bound forever trying to earn or win this life that was withheld, the New Negro had picked up her bags and left in an act of emotional, psychological self-determination.
Locke may not have gotten love from Hughes. But he got something he needed even more. Dialogue with a thinker with affection and affinity for the Black working class helped Locke to write the clarion call of the New Negro as the psychological liberation of the race led by its least-educated members. When Hughes published his recollection of that summer in The Big Sea, Locke disliked its portrait of their time together in Venice not only because it was unflattering to him but also because it was one-sided. Loving Hughes made Locke listen and appreciate Hughes’s love for and insight into the Black working-class humanity—an intelligence, a wisdom, about how to deal with America, how to deal with life and its many tragedies, that was distilled into folk culture. After listening to Hughes talk about the blues and jazz, forms that Locke abhorred, Locke looked at the papers and summaries from Johnson and Kellogg on his desk and saw a pattern they had not seen—that the Black working class was driving change in the early twentieth century. The New Negro refused to be a slave to anyone and chose to model for the world that the object of any oppressive situation can free himself or herself if he or she ignores the discourse of the official culture and embrace of self-love. Black working-class love for one another had freed them and the New Negro from mental slavery, and that was the grit and independent psyche of the Black masses. Langston’s love of working-class Black people had freed Locke to see them as metaphysical beings whose consciousness, not their objectified bodies, had changed African American history by choosing to leave the South. Langston had embodied a beauty that had opened Locke’s consciousness to the agency of the Black working class.
Locke’s other essay from San Remo, variously titled “The New Setting” and “The Harlem Scene” (it became “Harlem,” the lead article in the Survey Graphic), showcased the third breakthrough of his new thinking—that the continued formation of the New Negro identity was tied to space, to the new “environment” that allowed the Negro to escape being a mere victim of “environment” in the nineteenth century. A “renaissance” of Black culture was occurring in Harlem, because this new space was not a ghetto, but a crucible in which a diaspora of Black peoples was mixing and crystallizing the New Negro identity. “It [Harlem] has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another. So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race-welding.” Here Locke flipped the typical parallelism of American society, in which the city destabilized community. “Hitherto, it must be admitted that American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be more exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common. In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination.”31 Self-determination here was an act of valuation, as Locke’s value theory came through here as well. “The question is no longer what whites think of the Negro but of what the Negro wants to do and what price he is willing to pay to do it.”32
Locke wanted the New Negro to become cosmopolitan. “What we may be witnessing is the renaissance of a people as realistic as those more detached phenomena we associate with a liberated Ireland or a Mexico churned by racial revival.”33 The reference to the Mexican Renaissance, especially as a “racial revival,” is revealing. What distinguished a renaissance was the idea that the political and social energy of the New Negro or New Mexican was translated into a distinctive style of expression that connoted a unique cultural identity. That identity was linked to a willingness to develop the art that drew upon and fed that identity of an urban particularity regardless of what the outside world thought about it. African Americans did not possess a separate country, even though after hundreds of years of separate treatment they did possess a distinctive cultural style, or “Negroness.” In arguing for Harlem as a space for self-dependent, self-sustained cultural activity, Locke did not envision the Negro Renaissance as exclusively Black. Rather, like the Mexican Renaissance, which also welcomed White artists who could delineate “Mexicanness” out of their dialogue with the people, Locke welcomed White contributions to the portrayal of Negroness. In that sense, African American renaissance would not reproduce the error of American racism, but would evolve to its fullest potential if it was transracial and transnational.
Locke cited that sense of collective self-renewal and self-love in Harlem—“another statue of liberty on the landward side of New York.” By situating freedom in a particular space—the Harlem section of New York—Locke linked the cultural to an urban geography as the guarantor of the New Negro’s freedom. The Statue of Liberty metaphor reassured the reader that Harlem space was not a separatist space but integral to the definition of America as a beacon for and fulfillment of the desire for freedom like that of all Americans. “It [Harlem] stands for a folk movement which can be compared only with the pushing back of the western frontier in the first half of the last century, or the flow of immigration which swept in from overseas in the last half. Numerically far smaller than either … the volume of Negro migration is such that Harlem, itself but one of these northern settlements, has become none the less the greatest Negro community the world has known—without counterpart either in the South, or in Africa.”34 By referring to it as one such settlement, Locke unknowingly answered future critics who argued that the “Harlem” Renaissance, because it left out Black Chicago, Black Cleveland, and so forth, was a misnomer. Harlem was exalted over all others, because it fashioned the New Negro out of the greatest degree of international and diasporic diversity beyond that of other Black northern communities. It was the only completely cosmopolitan—Black and White, Mexican and American, southern and northern, European and African—community in the world.
Locke’s enthusiasm for Harlem reflected his sense that it was the one place that welcomed Black homosexuals in America. Many of the writers he was mentoring in the New Negro movement were gay, complex personalities who foregrounded race in their identities while powerfully shaped by their sexual orientation. The choice of the term “renaissance” reflected Locke’s awareness that many of the Italian Renaissance artists were gay, and that art had been their way of shaping their culture despite the marginality they felt from bourgeois social norm. Could not this be a form of salvation for his Black and queer spirits and the race as a whole—to find in creativity a language that would allow diverse personalities to speak to one another as loving human beings, less intense but akin to what he had sought with Hughes? Could love and beauty be the basis for community?
All of these hung like suspended possibilities in a concept whose strength and weakness resided in its closeted nature. Sexuality was hidden in plain view in the New Negro, who was new precisely because he or she was not fixed sexually, racially, socially, by the term. But this lack of fixity also brought instability, something Locke himself wrestled with. And yet ambivalence was refreshing in the Negro in 1924. “New Negro” had a frisson that “double consciousness,” “Talented Tenth,” even “Africa for the Africans” lacked. The New Negro was appealing because it was unpredictable. It was as unfinished as the essay Locke wrapped up in his folders as he left his veranda in San Remo and prepared to come home. But it had something new—a new mixture of the Negro to offer, one of equal parts identity, beauty, and justice led by queer men and women of Black America in tandem with their straight brothers and sisters. His was one way to add in queer people to a larger struggle to free the race from its White as well puritan demons.
Locke’s New Negro possessed an ambivalence and a roominess largely foreign to other conceptions, because its promise was a community that would reflect his take on his racial and sexual identity. Despite all its vagueness, the New Negro Locke formulated in San Remo built upon the Olympian self-confidence he had carried within him since he was a child. Like him, the real New Negro must be uplifted and cosmopolitan rather than morose. “This new psychology is radical in tone,—even it is for the most part pitched to a negative and often depressing attitude of resentment. Only in a few has it worked out to a spirit of cheerful and optimistic self-dependence. There are two ways of being independent,—being self-reliant and confident and being disillusioned and resentfully negative. Much depends on the education of the younger Negro as to which direction this psychology will take. Personally I favor nourishing it to the fullest extent especially along historical, artistic and cultural lines into a developed sense of self-dependence and independence.”35 Of course, such a formulation hid all the pain and suffering he and the “younger Negro” endured in trying simply to exist in a heartless world of racism and homosexual rejection.
Looking for love had ended in giving birth to the New Negro. It was not an end, but a beginning—and a powerful one. As his ship wound its way again into New York’s harbor, Locke was coming home with a “full kit.” Beauty had done its work.