The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

We pick up where chapter 1 left off—Langston Hughes in Soviet Central Asia, autumn 1932. He and twenty-one other African Americans had arrived in the USSR that June to make a movie about Jim Crow, and after the project’s cancellation, half the group toured Uzbekistan to witness Moscow’s elimination of czarist-era discrimination. However, only Hughes elected to also see Turkmenistan and, after abandoning the others, ended up in Ashgabat, in a run-down official guesthouse. Just by chance, the Hungarian Jewish author Arthur Koestler happened to be staying there as well and knocked on his door. In his 1954 autobiography, Koestler claims he did so because he heard Sophie Tucker’s “My Yiddishe Momma” playing on Hughes’s Victrola. Hughes would later dispute this account, claiming he never owned the record.¹ They agreed, though, that they became travel companions in Central Asia and, along with a Turkmen poet and Ukrainian ex-sailor, formed an impromptu touring “International Proletarian Writers’ Brigade.”²

I begin with this uncanny episode because of the discrepancies between Koestler and Hughes’s recollections—the different ways in which the Soviet-centered ethnic avant-garde of the early 1930s appears from the vantage of the 1950s. This applies not just to what record was playing that day. Koestler—now most famous for his anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon (1941)—uses his autobiography to repudiate his days as a young communist. Hughes’s own autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (1956), has a more conciliatory tone toward the Soviet Union, as discussed in the following. The more striking dissonance, however, is in how the two authors perceive each other—the fissures they express only in retrospect. Koestler remembers Hughes as “likeable and easy to get on with, but at the same time one felt an impenetrable, elusive remoteness which warded off all undue familiarity” (137). Hughes, in turn, explains this “remoteness” at length: it had everything to do with color. He describes how Koestler looked down on Russians and Central Asians as “unclean.” In contrast, Hughes saw “Soviet Asia with Negro eyes,” leading him, for instance, to partake in the Central Asian custom of sharing tea bowls, which the fastidious Koestler called “a bloody disgusting filthy habit!” (116, emphasis in original; 115). Hughes writes, “To Koestler, Turkmenistan was simply a primitive land moving into twentieth-century civilization. To me it was a colored land moving into orbits hitherto reserved for whites” (116, emphasis in original). Thus, Koestler lacked the insight provided by “Negro eyes,” and Hughes suggests that this led to both his condescension toward Central Asia and his subsequent break from communism.³

This assertion of “impenetrable” racial boundaries—reinforced by Hughes’s denial that he could have played this jazz song about a Jewish mother—is anathema to the cross-racial avant-garde I have been tracing. As such, both accounts from the 1950s can be read as explaining this group’s dissolution. By then the Comintern had been disbanded (Moscow’s concession to its World War II allies), Stalinism had long silenced the Soviet avant-garde, and McCarthyism had done the same for American radicals. But in the writings of Hughes and Koestler, we get a clear sense that, even by the early 1930s, the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nation were proving insuperable. Accordingly, their accounts gel with what became an increasingly widespread notion after World War II—that the Old Left had failed to bridge the interests of white (often Jewish) and black radicals, a charge most prominently leveled in Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.

This chapter unpacks the terms used to break from the Soviet-oriented left of the interwar years. In Hughes’s critical description of Koestler, we find the now commonplace language of cultural authenticity—the notion that to understand a community requires membership in that community or, at the very least, that one must be a person of color to understand people of color. However, this seeming replacement of avant-gardism with authenticity is better seen as a recalibration, for in fact the interwar ethnic avant-garde was conversant in cultural authenticity—albeit a notion of authenticity lacking the exclusivity Hughes here imparts to it. From a Soviet and avant-gardist perspective, to be “authentic” meant to reject mass culture and commercialization—one could be authentically black by being anticapitalist—leading to a very specific embrace of African American culture. The chapter brings back into focus this alternative authenticity, which, I argue, is still latent in Hughes’s 1956 autobiography. As we will see, the terms of the ethnic avant-garde’s replacement (by discrete, “authentic” cultures) were in fact the terms of its postwar survival—albeit in a severely diminished form.

While Eisenstein’s Mexican film was canceled before shooting was completed, Black and White was canceled before shooting even began—only two months after the group arrived in the Soviet Union. Given the considerable newspaper coverage the project had drawn, the result was a public relations disaster. “Negroes Adrift in ‘Uncle Tom’s’ Russian Cabin,” proclaimed the New York Herald Tribune, which portrayed the travelers as duped by Soviet promises of equality and stardom. In a statement, four group members called the cancellation a “compromise with the racial prejudice of American Capitalism and World Imperialism.” They suggested that Moscow’s bid for U.S. diplomatic recognition was to blame. Another rumor had it that Colonel Hugh Cooper, the American engineer heading construction of a massive Soviet dam, had personally lobbied Stalin to kill the project.⁶

As noted, the official explanation (script problems and technical difficulties) was far less sensational, and a majority of the group—including Hughes, who had been commissioned to overhaul the film’s dialogue—released a statement confirming the studio’s line. When the project did not begin again as promised the following year, blame shifted squarely to the faulty script. In the fall of 1933, Hughes—newly returned from the USSR via Asia—described it as “artistically weak and unsound,” mired by “defects of the plot and continuity” and thus failing to pass the muster of “the best minds of the Soviet film industry.”⁷ But again, it was not until I Wonder as I Wander—published three years after Hughes’s disavowal of communism before Senator Joseph McCarthy—that he provided an in-depth account of these defects. In a much-cited excerpt from a chapter called “Moscow Movie,” he writes that the script first drove him to astonishment, then to laugher, then to tears. Clearly the Russian scenarist “had never been to America,” resulting in a “pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts.” “Its general outline”—a tale of southern blacks rescued by white workers from the North—“was plausible enough, but almost all of its details were wrong and its accents misplaced.” He reports telling Mezhrabpomfil’m, “It is just simply not true to American life,” and then details for the reader a few key scenes defying “even plausible fantasy.”⁸ In short, the Russian scenarist (and, by association, Moscow and the Comintern) was simply unable to grasp African American realities.

The original Russian-language script, written by Georgii Eduardovich Grebner (1892–1954) and located in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, bears none of the glaring inaccuracies specified by Hughes. Nowhere does a “hot-blooded white aristocrat” at an upscale party proposition a black servant with the words “Honey, put down your tray; come, let’s dance”; indeed, there is no such party. The closest that the Grebner script comes to this is a drunken white man assaulting a black woman by a river at night. There are no “Negro capitalists” who own radio studios and broadcast towers used to call to the North for help. Instead, black workers in a boardinghouse have access to a shortwave radio and for a brief moment receive Radio Moscow. According to Hughes, the film was to climax with a race riot “in which the poor whites attack both rich and poor Negroes alike.” This attack was to have prompted an alliance across class lines. In fact, black workers remain hostile to the black bourgeoisie throughout the film, and the climax is a multiracial workers’ demonstration protesting a recent lynching. This is followed by the Ku Klux Klan’s (KKK) retaliation on a black neighborhood. White workers do rush to the rescue, but from a local factory rather than the North. Nevertheless, and in stark contrast to Hughes’s “trade-union version of the Civil War all over again,” the police and Klansmen prevail, shooting dead a handful of main characters and arresting most of the others.⁹

In response to this puzzle, one might argue that Hughes received some other version of the script, and indeed, there were four: two preliminary Russian-language drafts (one silent, the other sound) written by Grebner between August 1930 and February 1931; Grebner’s final, 1932 sound version, which is the focus of this chapter; and an English-language sound version written by the film’s German director, Carl Junghans, in consultation with Hughes.¹⁰ One scene in the English version does resonate somewhat with Hughes’s 1956 description: a circle of white men joke with and ask a black servant woman to dance with them, she complies, and one of these men is later seen emerging from her house at dawn.¹¹ However, this brief scene is not nearly as outlandish as what Hughes describes, and in any case, even this version of the script—a condensed, disjointed version of Grebner’s—lacks the absurd climax and resolution described in I Wonder as I Wander.¹²

Another possibility is that, after more than twenty years, Hughes simply misremembered the script’s content. However, this explanation does not account for why he remembered it as he did, with such vivid detail:

The momentary allure of the passage points to what I think is the correct explanation for the fabricated account: Hughes sought to distance himself from past leftist affinities, but in a way that preserved the USSR as a beacon of hope. Indeed, the passage can be read as a reflectively nostalgic glimpse of the interwar, Soviet-centered ethnic avant-garde.¹³ The montage of white workers and “militant Negroes” evokes the pioneering film techniques of Sergei Eisenstein, and the opening jab at Soviet crowd fetish can likewise be read as a tribute to that director—to his much remarked upon ability to present crowds as living organisms. Even the closing dismissal of the script as both too forward and backward can be read as echoing the multiple temporalities of Tatlin’s Tower, another never-completed project.

These readings become less far-fetched when we turn to the actual script, which explicitly references the Soviet avant-garde. At one point Grebner proposes a “montage” for the sake of “both visual and auditory defamiliarization [ostraneniia]”—evoking here Eisenstein and Viktor Shklovskii. This is for a scene in which we first see the main characters’ living quarters: Each corner of the empty room is marked by distinct sounds and objects, the goal being to use montage and defamiliarization to capture the nuances of individual characters. In one corner stands print equipment for the production of Herbert Hoover portraits (a trial print hangs on the wall); stylish clothing and a banjo case hang in the second; a small portrait of Lenin hangs in the third; and a large radio receiver and technical books fill the final corner. Aside from, arguably, the banjo, none of these objects is recognizably “black,” and the juxtaposition of Hoover and Lenin is an especially defamiliarizing touch. As the script explains, the point here is a “logical and intriguing revelation [raskrytiia]” of the main characters, suggesting that Grebner indeed sought to harness Soviet “technical and artistic developments” to break from past caricatures.¹⁴

Grebner’s efforts to do so resonate with a specific iteration of the Soviet avant-garde, namely, Sergei Tret’iakov’s futurist emphasis on facts (the focus of the previous chapter). That is, while Roar China was a factographic rendering of China, Black and White can be seen, at least in part, as a factographic rendering of African Americans. The scenarist Grebner was not a member of LEF but was apparently just as committed to accuracy as Tret’iakov. “All events…are based on real facts, borrowed from literary and newspaper sources,” Grebner writes in his notes.¹⁵ Countering Hughes’s claim that the script was based on the “very few books about Negro life in our country” that had been translated into Russian, the scenarist’s papers mention at least two of these sources—the leftist Harlem Liberator and the New Masses, which in the 1930s devoted considerable attention to African American struggles. The film’s opening titles, after establishing the setting, tersely repeat this claim of accuracy (“The Material: Facts”), and the script itself is interspersed with several asides detailing African American culture and history—from the improvisational qualities of the music, to the tendency of black pastors to address God directly in their sermons, to the founding and rise of the KKK, to the number of lynchings in 1931 (“over a hundred”) and the first two and a half months of 1932 (“47”). In short, Grebner did not take lightly his stated task of presenting “for the first time” in world cinema blacks “as people” rather than “tearful and sugary,” or “the faithful servant,” or “half idiots.” In his instructions to the director, he insists on the integration of “statistical, historical, and other information” into the fictional plot—a factual emphasis that troubles not only Hughes’s account but also commonplace dismissals of 1930s Soviet film as “socialist realist,” that is, depicting reality not as it was but as it should be.¹⁶

This is all to say that Grebner viewed Black and White as a vehicle not only for political agitation but also for artistic innovation—namely, the combination of fact and fiction to yield new representations of African Americans. To be sure, Grebner understood facts differently from the factographers: unlike Tret’iakov, he did not seek to present a single, actual event, and he lacked Tret’iakov’s interest in limited points of view. His scenario has a cohesion and seamlessness incongruous with the Soviet avant-garde. Nonetheless, just as with Tret’iakov, the project of presenting peoples of color as they really were was, at the time, radical in itself. On this score and despite Hughes’s dismissal, Grebner does a respectable job. In order to acquaint Soviet viewers with African Americans, he proposes opening the film with three historical fragments: The film’s first image is sunlight over an ocean straining to break through storm clouds, followed by a close-up of a black corpse flashing by on a crest. We are then transported to a slave ship—with the “live cargo” packed so tightly that no one can move, women and children begging for water, and corpses thrown overboard by white sailors. The second fragment is a New Orleans slave auction, where we see a father sold away from his crying family. We are then shown plantation labor, including overseers cracking whips, after which we are returned to the slave auction, where two “nearly white” sisters are up for sale. (Grebner here informs the director, “There is an entire gamma of shades from ‘almost black’ to ‘almost white.’” He thus makes it clear that not all Soviets thought African Americans were literally black—an expectation that frequently irked the Black and White group.¹⁷) The third fragment is a nighttime uprising at a plantation. In the dim reflected light by an irrigation ditch, a pale-faced landowner is besieged by a “mass of dark people filled with hatred.” Next, though, we hear the sounds of attacking horsemen, see the brief skip of a cavalry line, which is followed by daybreak—order restored through the image of a black corpse rotting in the sun. Grebner thus opens with an orgy of violence—a grotesque, even fetishistic focus on abject black bodies. This is his shot across the bow of Hollywood decorum, his awakening of Soviet-audience sympathies, his starting point for a new, more coordinated black uprising.¹⁸

Again, in contrast to Roar China, Black and White is not based on a single historical event but nonetheless has a plausible plot. The film centers around an aniline dye (not steel) factory in an unspecified southern city, with management plotting to pit black workers against their white counterparts. Accordingly, although the workers appear identically black beside the aniline boilers—their skin colors revealed only after they shower off the dye—there are divisions. The factory’s trade union refuses to admit blacks. When an Irishman, O’Grady, accidentally pushes a black worker to his death, most whites pay no heed. However, through the efforts of the film’s main characters—an interracial mix of communists—an alliance is eventually forged after the black workers refuse to cross a white picket line. Meanwhile, as a subplot, the main characters stumble upon Sidney Brooker, a teenager unjustly accused of “violating the honor” of a white woman. The factory management tries to use this charge to divide the workers again, but after Brooker is caught and lynched by the KKK, blacks and whites—joined along the way by Chinese laundry workers—demonstrate together, resembling what Grebner calls an “avant-garde column” as they wend their way through the streets. As mentioned, the film ends with the KKK’s retaliatory assault of the black ghetto, and despite a valiant defense—with the climactic battle cry “Long live Moscow…. Long live Soviet America”—Grebner reserves victory for a future date. As the surviving black and white communists march to prison in mixed-race columns, they sing, “We will return for a new fight.”¹⁹

Revisionist scholarship on African American radicalism—which tends to emphasize local agency and downplay top-down, center-periphery control—largely affirms this plot and Grebner’s claims of accuracy. Robin Kelley, for instance, has shown that the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) made significant gains among southern blacks in the 1930s. In 1929 the party established a regional headquarters in Birmingham, and though led by white northerners, it attracted black workers through calls for social and economic equality, as well as by trumpeting the Comintern’s endorsement of Black Belt self-determination. By August 1930, “over five hundred working people populated the Party’s mass organizations, of whom between 80 and 90 percent were black.”²⁰ These numbers swelled further following the CPUSA’s defense of the “Scottsboro Boys”—nine African American men wrongly convicted in 1931 of raping two white women aboard a train. In Black and White, the Brooker subplot, called “a second Scottsboro” at one point in the script, clearly evokes this case, which received considerable attention in the presses of both the American left and the Soviet Union.²¹ To be sure, revisionist work also reveals the film’s faulty optimism, seen particularly in its abruptly formed workers’ alliance. In fact, the CPUSA’s success with blacks largely alienated white workers, who occasionally accused the party of a “problack bias.” In contrast to the script, black-white alliances were often reluctant and could even leave racist attitudes intact. Moreover, violent confrontations involving black communists were rare, far outweighed by “evasive, cunning forms of resistance.”²² Nevertheless, Grebner’s depictions of blacks are far from the “ludicrousness” described by Hughes and mirror the journals and newspapers of the American left. Indeed, the scenarist writes that he “borrowed” the film’s parting shot from the May 1931 cover of New Masses.²³

In retrospect, radical journals published in New York might seem a skewed source on southern blacks, and the cover cited by Grebner, featuring two perfect lines of demonstrating workers, now conveys an unsettling uniformity. Except for their evenly alternating black and white heads, the workers are identical, with the same black pants, white shirts, and almost no facial details. Upon closer examination, though, we see that the foremost worker on Grebner’s New Masses cover has a black face and black right forearm but a white left forearm. Though this may be a simple oversight, it is possible to read this incongruity as acknowledging what Ralph Ellison has called the “interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness”—the notion that the categories “black” and “white” do not exist objectively but have defined and redefined each other throughout American history.²⁴ Accordingly, in a scene from Grebner reminiscent of the New Masses cover, the Irishman O’Grady, driven to hunger and desperation after being fired from the factory, appears on a cabaret stage in blackface. Afterward, infuriated by the drunken audience of Klan members, he responds to a dandy’s mockery with two punches—one fist white, the other stained black with shoe polish. Ultimately he dies in defense of the ghetto.²⁵ Grebner, it seems, perceived the ambiguity of American race relations in the early twentieth century, which often cast Irish immigrants as black or semiwhite. Also included in the script is a budding romance between a black man and a Jewish woman.

This fact-checking is not meant just to disprove Hughes’s account but also to bring back into focus the script’s factographic traces. Though Grebner was, again, not a formal member of LEF, he clearly had exposure to its documentary innovations. His incorporation of American newspapers into the script evokes Tret’iakov’s own blurring of theater and reportage. The emphasis on racial intermixture evokes Tret’iakov’s rejection of exoticism in favor of ethnography. The two-toned fists, along with the interracial romance and triangulation of black, white, and Irish, assert the contingency and flexibility of racial formations. As such, these details—these disruptive facts—serve to unsettle received notions of race in a way similar to Roar China, with its emphasis on Chinese-Western intermixture. However, in addition to Grebner’s gestures to factography, I would also like to highlight his ability to subvert the cultural conventions of his time, in this case, blackface minstrelsy and masquerade—the crossing of color lines that proved so seminal for the likes of D. W. Griffith and Ezra Pound but that also reinforced racial hierarchies.²⁶ In contrast, the Black and White script provides an instance of racial crossing that levels hierarchies, that serves as a vehicle not solely for modernist innovation or mass entertainment but also for cross-racial solidarity. Despite the limits of Grebner’s script—discussed further in the following—it holds out the hope that a combination of revolutionary politics and artistic innovation could undo the deleterious effects of past representations. It also reopens the now counterintuitive possibility that an “authentic picture of Negro life in America” could be produced by a Russian writer, and before delving further into the script, it is necessary to unpack this possibility—more specifically, that Soviet and avant-gardist notion of authenticity.

Robert Gooding-Williams has recently unpacked the contours of this discourse, noting how the sorrow songs chapter in The Souls of Black Folk emerged from Du Bois’s own distance from the vast majority of blacks, how he presented the songs as the basis of a “racially distinctive spiritual identity” in order to legitimate his claims of connection to, and thus leadership over, African Americans as a whole. In short, Souls deploys notions of black authenticity for clear political ends—to override the problem of Talented Tenth elitism, and as Gooding-Williams goes on to explain, to press for black rights solely within the framework of American democracy (i.e., reciprocal recognition, formal equality). Out of frustration with this framework, Du Bois later renounced his U.S. citizenship and embraced communist programs for equality, even as Hughes renounced his own, past communist ties. The point for now, though, is that Du Bois’s early articulation of black authenticity—again, echoed in Hughes’s 1956 account—was designed to be compatible with American democratic ideals, thus excluding a priori broader criticisms of capitalist modernity.²⁸

However, within African American discourses there existed another understanding of authenticity, one geared toward world revolution rather than elite leadership. Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) points to this by connecting black hopes and struggles with those “of minority peoples everywhere.” Still a communist at this point, Wright adds that “a Negro writer must learn to view the life of a Negro living in New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s South Side with the consciousness that one-sixth of the earth surface belongs to the working class.”²⁹ He refers here to the Soviet Union, which, as discussed in the introduction, he admired in large part for its valorization of minority cultures and languages. More specifically, against Du Bois’s decrial of “debasements and imitations,” Wright embraced a Soviet ethnographic practice that, as noted, stripped away the divide between scholar and subject. A, for instance, Russian or Jewish researcher could help collect Kazakh folk stories, bring them back to the state ethnography museum in Leningrad, and then demonstrate how different Soviet folklores borrowed from one another. In keeping with the state’s nationalities policy, the task was to identify and preserve the distinct “character” that Stalin granted to each group. Of course, the USSR was not alone in dispatching ethnographers from center to periphery. However, even before 1917, Russian ethnography was distinct from its Western counterparts in claiming Asia as a marker of Russian distinction and denying “altogether the essential differences between the traditions of Europe and the ‘East.’”³⁰

What I would like to suggest is that, through a combination of Soviet ethnography, avant-gardism, and nationalities policy a distinctive brand of cultural authenticity emerged—one determined by anticapitalism rather than descent, “authentic” as shorthand for “untainted by capitalism.” We encountered this authenticity in chapters 1 and 2: it appeared as Mayakovsky’s rejection of Mexican souvenirs and the “exotica of starvation” and Tret’iakov’s rejection of “old false and exotic ideas about China.” To be sure, Mayakovsky proceeded to find authenticity in a “traditional exoticism” that was “colourfully poetic and non-profitable,” while Tret’iakov rejected exoticism altogether in favor of a “true China” of street scenes and motley attire. Nonetheless, the two advanced a clear political and aesthetic prerequisite for culture to be considered “authentic,” namely, an opposition to kitsch and commodification that many theorists (from Clement Greenberg to Renato Poggioli to Peter Bürger) have tied to avant-gardism.³¹

We have also seen this Soviet notion of authenticity applied specifically to African American culture: Lydia Filatova’s advice to Hughes that he “draw closer to the Negro masses and talk their language” and use Mayakovsky as a model for doing so. However, as I emphasized in my discussion of Hughes’s Mayakovsky translations, such applications were not a one-way street, not simply a case of Stalinist policies or Soviet discourses playing out in the United States. Indeed, anticapitalist, revolutionary notions of black authenticity very much emerged in dialogue with African Americans and the American left. James Smethurst offers useful contextualization here, showing how this Soviet notion of authenticity gelled with long-standing desires to free black vernacular from minstrelsy and “plantation literature.” Seeking to reclaim “their” culture, several African American writers in the 1930s responded by deploying an “‘authentic’ construction of the folk that could be posed against mass-culture appropriations.” As Smethurst writes,

In other words, radicalism was to cleanse black folk of minstrelsy’s “contamination,” the implication being that market influences were intrinsically corrupting. Through this lens, black vernacular appropriated by the bourgeoisie was inauthentic, serving only to reinforce stereotypes, while black vernacular that opposed mass culture was authentic. Anticapitalism was to rescue black culture from inauthenticity, a construction that Smethurst illustrates via Sterling Brown’s poetry. Rejecting the “high” diction of northern blacks and the white-sponsored jazz of New York, Brown’s Southern Road (1932) presents a distinct southern vernacular apparently untainted by markets and bent on resistance. Brown thus romanticizes the Black Belt as the authentic, anticapitalist foundation of African American culture.³³

The yoking of vernacular to resistance yielded a clear criterion for evaluating black authenticity, which led white radicals on both sides of the Atlantic to assert their supposed authority on the matter. As we saw in chapter 1, Filatova in Moscow believed herself qualified to define “the Negro masses” and “their language.” Similarly, New Masses editor Mike Gold derided New York nightclubs for peddling a false black voice, spoiled by wealthy white patrons such as Carl Van Vechten: “The Harlem cabaret no more represents the Negro mass than a pawnshop represents the Jew, or an opium den the struggling Chinese nation.”³⁴ On the other hand, Gold embraced spirituals as untouched by markets and, as such, promising a black art and literature “that will amaze the world when revealed.” He later suggested, though, that in order for this to happen, religious lyrics would have to be replaced by revolutionary ones, with just the melodies and dialects preserved. For example, as Barbara Foley notes, in 1932 Gold praised black workers in Chicago for transforming “Gimme That Old Time Religion” into “Gimme That New Communist Spirit.”³⁵

Likewise, throughout the early 1930s New Masses published a series on “Negro Songs of Protest,” in which their white compiler, Lawrence Gellert, emphasized southern black dialects as well as a shift from religious themes:

These new songs of the Negro differ from the well-known spirituals. Whereas the latter as a group are prayer songs—a racial heritage, part of the old, dead past—grooved and set, and now sung practically without variation throughout the Black Belt, these new songs are secular—reflecting the contemporary racial environment—the peonage, poverty and degradation…. And they’re still in process. Never sung twice quite in the same way. New verses constantly added. In these songs we catch the Negro for the first time with his mask off. The mask he has for generations been constrained to assume in order to pick up the crumbs from the white man’s table in peace.

Gellert here makes the too hasty assumption that he himself has access to this woodchopper’s mind, that the song is not being directed against him as well. Yet the song harmonizes with the racial “veil” and “double consciousness” identified by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”³⁷ According to Gellert and Gold, the key to shattering this duplicity (both inward and outward) was a turn from religion to radicalism, expressed in what they heard as a uniquely black inflection. This would make the African American subject whole, both in his own eyes and in those of white radicals.³⁸

In hindsight, the problems with this understanding of the “authentic black subject” are clear. First and foremost is its singular definition of black culture—confined to the Black Belt, drawn almost exclusively from male singers and writers, and uncritically dismissive of religion. Gellert’s delineation of black spirituals as static and “songs of protest” as fluid seems forced at best. Nevertheless, in southern black vernacular and music, U.S. communists (both black and white) believed that they had located authentic African American culture. In turn, the American left’s embrace of black folk culture influenced Soviet views. In a 1934 entry on “Negro literature” for a Soviet literary encyclopedia, Filatova draws from New Masses, mentioning the articles and stories of Eugene Gordon and quoting from Gellert’s “Negro Songs of Protest.” Her bibliography includes a collection of these songs translated into Russian. Thus, Filatova’s—like Grebner’s—authority on African Americans was based, at least in part, on American communist writings that themselves drew inspiration from the Soviet Union.

The result was a similar understanding of black culture among American and Soviet communists. Citing Hughes, Filatova describes African American literature’s most recent revolutionary examples as possessing the following components: (1) content that highlights the racism confronting blacks, in response tending toward class consciousness and away from religious themes; (2) form that draws from black “national [narodnye, which can also be translated as “people’s” or “folk”] ‘blues’ and ‘spirituals,’” as well as a distinct “Negro dialect.”³⁹ Apparently Hughes did not disagree: as noted in chapter 1, he met with Filatova during the Black and White trip and, by all indications, highly valued her readings. Arnold Rampersad suggests that her criticism of his religious “relapses” prompted him to write from Moscow in March 1933, “Never must mysticism or beauty be gotten into any religious motive when used as a proletarian weapon.”⁴⁰

Filatova’s remarkably clear definition of laudable, authentic black culture was the product of a transatlantic, cross-racial leftist exchange that, in retrospect, belies Hughes’s caricature of uninformed Soviets. This definition resonates well with Black and White. I take up later Grebner’s own rendering of Negritianskii narodnyi bliuz (Negro national blues), but suffice it for now to note the script’s antireligious thrust, enacted through a “Negro preacher” character who, “calling to mind a fox,” speaks at a deceased black worker’s funeral but later evicts the man’s widow and children. (The coup de grace against religion comes near the film’s climax, when the antilynching demonstrators sing in unison Joe Hill’s “Preacher and the Slave”—the Wobbly hit also known as “Pie in the Sky.”)⁴¹ However, there were certainly limits to Filatova’s definition, most prominently an unwillingness on her part to venture into black dialect—just as Mayakovsky exhibited in his poem “Black and White.” While she insisted that Hughes use a distinctly black language, she herself opted not to do so: in her Russian translations of the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” and one of Gellert’s protest songs, she inserts no indications of a nonstandard dialect, yielding only literal meanings. Likewise, except for “one or two” songs, Grebner specifies that his Black and White was to be in “clean [chistom] Russian language,” arguing that “Russian speech, distorted with an imagined ‘American’ accent,” sounds “horrible.”⁴² Here we find an uncharacteristic inability to overcome racial barriers, perhaps even an echo of Du Bois’s notion of authenticity, but also a welcome contrast to Western white modernism’s eager exploitations of black dialect. The point for now, though, is that a shared understanding of black authenticity emerged across Soviet and American leftist circles—one that combined vernacular culture with radical anticapitalism, which in turn was to purge vernacular culture of minstrelsy and religion.

To help capture this alternative authentic culture, Mezhrabpomfil’m asked the group of twenty-two to bring plenty of records and had them rehearse spirituals during their idle time in Moscow. Indeed, the incorporation of African American music into the film is the script’s most striking feature. Music here serves as a cross-lingual medium for joining different cultures, histories, and spaces, for broaching the boundaries between American and Soviet, black and Russian, as well as black and Jewish. For example, near the film’s start, a “sad (or angry) Negro song” accompanies a black worker’s funeral. While Grebner does not specify melody or lyrics, he states that “Negroes are beautiful improvisers, and quite often, their choruses are constructed in the form of dialogue. Therefore, the ‘choir-leader’ [khoreg] can speak not only about [the deceased] Elias individually, but about all the colored people of America.” Regarding the choir’s language, Grebner notes, “There are a great number of beautiful Negro songs never translated into Russian language, but even irrespective of this, a song can be specially written for this case.”⁴³

A second example finds the black main characters reworking a sad Jewish workers’ song—this in a mournful scene following the capture of Sidney Brooker. The owner of the boardinghouse where these characters live happens to be an immigrant from czarist Russia, the Jewish tailor and would-be Bolshevik Isaak Vorbi; the small Lenin portrait hanging in the room is his. He sings to his daughter Lizzy in Russian:

Third, while waiting for the KKK’s assault near the end of the film, Hayes, again with his banjo, sings a song called “Blue River” in Vorbi’s staircase. Grebner provides the lyrics but calls them only an “approximate text”:

Grebner notes that his Russian-language rendering of a black sorrow song is “arrhythmic”—one might even say “syncopated” along the lines of the “drowsy syncopated tune” immortalized by Langston Hughes in “The Weary Blues” (1926).⁴⁷ Indeed, in appearance as well as its irregular rhythm and rhyme scheme (e.g., “ruka / blizka / reka”), “Blue River” resembles that poem more than any sorrow song, though the repetition of “Golubaia reka” seems to reference the repeated lines of the blues. However, Grebner modestly states that “by no means do I lay claim to a final version,” adding that he would not object to having the song performed in English. He stipulates only that the words correspond to the following visuals, to be displayed during Hayes’s performance: chained slaves in the woods being beaten, their riverside revolt, and their escape to a floating barrel. They drag behind them fallen black bodies while an alligator devours their overseer’s corpse.

This opens the way for the final song covered here, which commences just as “Blue River” ends. Hayes’s banjo gives way to “new and unexpected sounds” from Vorbi’s shortwave radio—Radio Moscow, playing the upbeat Red Army song “Amur Partisans,” about the Russian Civil War:

Whether intentionally or not, Grebner here echoes Mayakovsky’s poem “Camp ‘Nit Gedaige’” (1925), in which the Hudson River flows into the Moscow River and young Jewish American communists pledge allegiance to Soviet power. That is, Grebner uses music not only to connect Jews to blacks, then blacks to Russians, but also to advance a new, Soviet-centered mapping of space and time: an American river leads to Moscow, while African American struggles are first juxtaposed with those of Russian Jews, then folded into the history of the Bolshevik Revolution.⁵⁰ Just as with Willie in Mayakovsky’s own “Black and White” (1925), the solution for these workers is to address their concerns to Moscow and the Comintern. All the while, however, Grebner is careful to maintain the distinctness of these juxtaposed peoples, places, and histories. We see such an effort in the “black” adaptation of the Jewish tailor’s song. Though Hayes takes his cue from Vorbi, his “unique joy-of-life” transforms the original, and, presumably, his rendition of “Amur River” in the film’s final scene would have also showcased some perceived “black” nuance. This likely would have resembled the use of music in the Dziga Vertov documentary Three Songs About Lenin—built around montages of Central Asia and Moscow that collapse the distance between center and periphery. Produced by Mezhrabpomfil’m in 1934, its first extended “song”—on the unveiling of women in Uzbekistan—includes children marching first to a Soviet brass-and-flute sound track then to an Uzbek stylization of the same.⁵¹

My aim here is to underscore Grebner’s innovative use of music as well as to place him in the good company of the Soviet avant-garde. However, there are problems with his efforts to describe and, indeed, author African American singing. Rather unfortunately, he states that his “blue river” refers to the famously brown Mississippi, adding, “There likely exist a few songs about ‘the blue river’…I personally have heard, I think, three, but I’ve thought of this myself.”⁵² To be sure, this howler, as well as Grebner’s essentialist descriptions of African Americans as improvisational, musical, and happy-go-lucky are disconcerting. In his defense, it is necessary to remember that while Grebner was not the first nonblack writer to try his hand at black music, he was among the few who did so with the explicit aim of leveling racial hierarchies. However, a closer examination of Grebner’s use of music reveals Black and White’s more fatal shortcoming, one emerging not so much from the script itself but from the context in which it was written. Grebner provides for cultural diversity and an anticapitalist authenticity, but as the film progresses, this diversity falls increasingly within a Soviet orbit, centering on a sacralized Moscow. Note the trajectory of the preceding examples: described in the preceding: at first, the black characters sing among themselves to mark the funeral of one of their own, then their singing follows the lead of a Russian Jew, who establishes a link between the United States and the USSR, and finally, the music of Radio Moscow magically folds the struggle for black freedom into a Soviet-centered revolution. Of course, Mayakovsky’s “Black and White” likewise instructs the Afro-Cuban Willie to look to Moscow, and Tret’iakov’s Roar China (1926) tells Chinese boatmen to draw hope from the Bolshevik Revolution. However, with Grebner’s 1932 Black and White, Moscow has a far more active, controlling presence, with the African American characters effectively drafted into the Red Army. This is not to criticize Grebner but simply to affirm that the Soviet 1930s was a time of Stalinist centralization. For artists and writers, this meant growing restrictions on creative possibility, and as we will see, the script itself fell victim to state interests. Meanwhile, as discussed in the introduction, Moscow’s promotion of national cultures, territories, and elites streamlined the management of Soviet peoples, which meant that policies that at first appeared beneficent could also serve state terror—for instance, the deportations of entire peoples by the end of the decade.⁵³

Perhaps this is what Langston Hughes had in mind when he wrote that Black and White was “simply not true to American life.” Perhaps he meant to say that the scenario—like the Comintern’s calls for Black Belt self-determination—presented a simplified, essentialized blackness, readily available to state co-option.⁵⁴ However, I Wonder as I Wander expresses no concerns about the domination enabled by Soviet essentialism, suggesting only that a fact-finding visit to the United States would have made this essentialism more plausible. This is not to fault Hughes for missing the looming terror of the 1930s. During his stay in the USSR, he was shown what he was meant to see, and upon his return to the United States, he had no way of checking or updating his facts. Nor is it my goal to demonstrate once again that the USSR committed betrayals, or that essentialism (even when “strategic”) bears blinders and perils. Returning once more to Hughes’s “Moscow Movie” account, we find more here than meets the eye—so typical for this author.

Thus, “scenario and technical difficulties” was nothing more than a diversion. The left-leaning members of the Black and White group, not fully sure what to make of the cancellation but convinced of the possible political repercussions for the CPUSA, had little choice but to toe the party line. However, this faction also prepared a private report critical of Mezhrabpomfil’m. “Members of this group have read the scenario,” it declared. “They are unanimous in their belief that it is essentially true to Negro life in America and that in the hands of a competent director a powerful film can be made from it.”⁵⁷ Addressing the Comintern, they urged immediate production. Instead, they received a written assurance from Mezhrabpomfil’m that the project would recommence in 1933. As noted, this promise went quietly unfulfilled.⁵⁸

In effect, Langston Hughes’s 1956 account buttresses Mezhrabpomfil’m’s official reason for “postponement.” We can see him as adopting and running with the “faulty scenario” line, playfully concealing one sacrifice to Soviet realpolitik and “socialism in one country.” According to him, there was no sacrifice at all, only an inauthentic script—a perfectly acceptable criticism given the Soviet valorization of black authenticity. Indeed, Mezhrabpomfil’m was the first to forward this criticism, which was utterly preferable to “betrayal”; I Wonder as I Wander merely provided the details, in a sense fulfilling the Soviets’ request that Hughes redo the script himself. Interestingly, however, Hughes recalls declining this request:

It is in this statement that we can discern a crack in Hughes’s account: he charges the Russian scenarist with ignorance even as he professes his own. That is, had Hughes written the scenario, it, too, would have fallen under the shadow of inauthenticity. This concept’s versatility is here made clear: a southerner or a unionist could have applied it against Hughes, just as Hughes applied it against Grebner.⁵⁹ However, Hughes’s own deployment of the authentic versus the inauthentic bore a particular brilliance in that it killed two birds with one stone. His account upheld the party line and yet, by ridiculing Moscow’s outreach to African Americans, it also gelled with U.S. anticommunism. As a result, even amid the heightening Cold War, Hughes managed to have it both ways—to be both black and communist, American and Soviet.

His deployments of authenticity were precisely what allowed for such crossings. By invoking black authenticity—the film as “not true” to African American realties—he drew a clear line between the United States and the USSR, thereby allaying anticommunist fears of a “Soviet America.” With this line, this curtain, set in place, Hughes was then free to preserve the Soviet Union as an isolated bastion of equality. I Wonder as I Wander’s occasional complaints about the USSR regard mostly bureaucracy and shortages—like the inauthentic script, nothing that questions Moscow’s good intentions and inspirational allure. The autobiography does include rumors of political prisoners, but Hughes adds, “I could not bring myself to believe…that life was not better for most people now than it had been in the days of the Volga boatmen, the Asiatic serfs, and the Jim Crow signs” (173). Of course, it was Hughes of 1932 who reached this conclusion, but Hughes of 1956 faithfully recounts it, despite professing a “complete reorientation of my thinking and emotional feelings” before Joseph McCarthy in 1953.⁶⁰

Indeed, Hughes displayed remarkable consistency in his regard for the Soviet Union and, in his departure from the left, avoided serious charges against either the CPUSA or the USSR. It is instructive here to turn to his McCarthy testimony, which Rampersad describes as “a rhetorical tour de force,” deftly avoiding unequivocal attacks on communism.⁶¹ Note, for instance, this exchange with Roy Cohn, the Senate subcommittee’s chief counsel:

Rampersad draws a helpful parallel between Hughes’s McCarthy testimony and I Wonder as I Wander, noting that neither forum was used “to distort the facts of Soviet Russia as he saw them, or to slander or denounce the Soviet people.” As a result, the testimony provoked only mild criticism from the American leftist press, and the Daily Worker called Hughes one of the country’s “great talents” in its praise of I Wonder as I Wander.⁶³ Meanwhile, his poetry continued to be published and celebrated in the Soviet Union, with one critic noting there in 1981,

Such political delineations can be seen as analogous to this chapter’s opening racial delineation between Hughes and Arthur Koestler. As mentioned, I Wonder as I Wander attributes Koestler’s dissatisfaction with Soviet Central Asia—and, implicitly, the Soviet project as a whole—to his lack of “Negro eyes.” However, in a gesture to the cross-racial ties of the interwar years, Hughes proceeds to link the Jewish author’s dissatisfaction to that which he perceives in Ellison, Wright, Wallace Thurman, and Myron Brinig. Notably, three of these four were African Americans with former communist connections, suggesting a link between lapsed leftism and, as Hughes puts it, emotional hypochondria—a tendency to be “unhappy when not unhappy” and wear one’s sadness on one’s sleeve (120, emphasis in original). The autobiography then suggests that this affliction emerges from racial and ethnic inauthenticity, manifested as black and Jewish self-loathing. After Hughes gives his last American pencil to a Bukharan Jew, Koestler is shown exploding: “‘He tricked you. That Jew!’ Koestler said, ‘I’m ashamed! Ashamed! Langston, I’ll get your pencil back for you.’” For the embarrassed Hughes, who gets his pencil back a few hours later, this brings to mind both Jewish and African Americans who blanch at any behavior that they think “disgraces the race” (138). In contrast, the “Moscow Movie” caricature—a “signifyin(g)” satire?⁶⁶—serves to cast Hughes as authentically black, meaning, in this instance, free from such neuroses (further explored in chapter 4), loyal to the United States, and yet still aligned with Soviet interests. By proving himself authentic on all fronts, Hughes managed to appease both sides of the Iron Curtain, deftly keeping himself above the Cold War’s fray. Among the many people of color from around the world who once sought hope from Moscow, few fared so splendidly.

The loser of history to Hughes’s winner was Black and White’s consultant, Lovett Fort-Whiteman—as noted in the introduction, among the first African Americans to join the CPUSA and, in 1924, the first African American to receive Comintern training in Moscow. During his eight-month stay, Fort-Whiteman marveled at the apparent elimination of racism, and after urging the Comintern to do more to organize blacks, he was placed at the head of a new recruiting organ called the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). Though a passionate orator, however, he was perhaps better suited for creative rather than political pursuits. Prior to becoming a communist, he had published theater reviews and short stories in the black socialist Messenger and played the title role in a touring production of Othello.⁶⁷ Accordingly, his leadership over the ANLC had a dramatic, iconoclastic quality, with the flair of performance art. On the streets of Chicago in 1925, he wore traditional Russian clothing that gave him the appearance of a “Buddhist monk” and “veritable Black Cossack”—an instance of “Afro-Orientalism” akin to Claude McKay’s 1922 poem “Moscow.” However, there are indications that Fort-Whiteman sought something stranger and more alien than this. A fellow African American communist described him as “an unknown quantity,” someone who “both repelled and fascinated” by rejecting familiar notions of blackness—clear markers of ethnic avant-gardism but unfortunate qualities for a community organizer. At the ANLC’s opening festivities, he staged a Russian ballet and an untranslated play by Alexander Pushkin, whose African roots, once again, were widely touted by early black radicals. These programming choices may not have been “avant-gardist” in themselves, but in the context of 1920s black Chicago, they most certainly were.⁶⁸

Unlike Hughes, Fort-Whiteman proved fatally inauthentic as both an African American and a leftist. In 1928, he was called back to Moscow because of the ANLC’s “severe isolation” under his helm. That same year, he failed to support the Black Belt thesis, disputing the idea that African Americans constituted a “nation” and pressing class solidarity instead.⁶⁹ In the Soviet Union he married a Russian Jewish woman, worked for the Comintern, and kept in close contact with black radicals. Indeed, though he is never mentioned in I Wonder as I Wander, he greeted the Black and White delegation upon its arrival in Leningrad by train in June of 1932. The travelers could not have been surprised, well aware that he had been assisting with the script: for instance, in her invitation to Hughes to join the group, Louise Thompson notes, “The scenario is now in preparation, with Lovett Whiteman as consultant to see that it is true to Negro life.” Grebner’s script specifically cites him as a source on funeral songs.⁷⁰ Through his familiarity with the project, Fort-Whiteman likely took issue with the “faulty scenario” line and seems to have supported those who called the cancellation a political compromise. In her August 24 letter home, Thompson writes, “Whiteman turns out to be an awful person and such a person that one can only have contempt for. Instead of helping us, he encouraged Ted [Poston] and Thurston [McNairy Lewis] in their escapades.”⁷¹

The noose tightens. In 1935 a Comintern committee noted “reported efforts of Lovett Whiteman to mislead some of the Negro comrades,” though without specifying either these efforts or these comrades. However, it urged two prominent black communists—including William Patterson, Louise Thompson’s future husband—to take up the matter before returning to the United States. The following year at a Foreign Club meeting in Moscow, Fort-Whiteman reportedly offered adverse criticism of Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks. This action was deemed “counter-revolutionary” by “a black lawyer from the upper echelon” of the CPUSA, namely Patterson again. Meanwhile, official correspondence between American communists and the Comintern branded Fort-Whiteman a Trotskyist, sealing his fate. On July 1, 1937, the height of Stalin’s purges, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs convicted him of “anti-Soviet agitation,” a catchall charge at the time. At first he was exiled to Kazakhstan, where he worked as a teacher, but this sentence was changed to hard labor in May 1938. He died of “weakening of cardiac activity” in a Siberian prison camp on January 13, 1939.⁷²

These tragic details affirm once more that Soviet dealings with African Americans were a collaborative effort, involving both blacks and whites, in both the United States and the USSR—a frequent emphasis in scholarly efforts to revisit the “black-red thread.” Fort-Whiteman has long haunted this scholarship, which makes it all the more admirable that Glenda Gilmore’s recent Defying Dixie places him at the forefront of African American communism. Though faulting him for not catching, in his capacity as Black and White’s consultant, Grebner’s inaccuracies (Gilmore takes Hughes’s account literally), she also eulogizes him: “No one knew of his eagerness, his recklessness, his abiding faith in poor working people. In the final, perfect equality of the gulag, it mattered not a whit that he was a black man, only that he was a broken man.”⁷³ Gilmore here movingly joins Fort-Whiteman to all those shattered by Stalinism. The “black-red thread” unravels into the broader, troubled history of twentieth-century communism—though, as she concludes, the study of historical failures leaves open the possibility of “lost causes found.”⁷⁴

Shei moia igla…	Sew, my needle…
Kak mnogo zla	How much evil
Prinosiat liudi.	People bear.
Bedniak portnoi	A poor tailor
V strane chuzhoi—	In a strange land
Chto on takoe?	What is he anyway?⁴⁴

Khleshchet plet’ i zveniat kandaly…	A whip lashes and shackles clang…
Skvoz’ lesnoi burelom	Through forest of wind-fallen trees
Tianem, tianem stvoly…	We drag, we drag trunks…
Vse litso v krovi—bol’no noet ruka…	Whole face bloody, arm ringing in pain.
Poterpi,—vperedi,—uzh blizka	Hurry, ahead, it’s already close
Golubaia reka…	Blue river…
go—lu—baia…	blue…
Byl korotok boi	The battle was short
I eshche ne odin vperedi…	And there’s more than one ahead…
Nas neset golubaia volna	The blue wave carries us
V okean uvlekaia…	Away to the ocean…
Kogda vse kak odin—	When all are as one
Ne strashna nam bor’ba nikakaia	No struggle can scare us
Golubaia reka…	Blue river…
Golubaia reka…	Blue river…
go—lu—baia…	blue…⁴⁶

I ostanutsia kak v skazke	And remaining as in a tale are
Nashi dal’nie ogni,	Our faraway fires,
Golubye nochi Spasska,	The blue nights of Spassk,
Karachaevskie dni…	And Karachai days…
I na Tikhom okeane	And on the Pacific Ocean
Svoi zakonchili pokhod…	They ended their campaign…⁴⁸