ou are perfectly correct about Eric Walrond,” Robert Davis told Edna Worthley Underwood, “He is quite the most promising young man I have seen in a long time.” An esteemed translator and author, Underwood had forwarded four stories to the editor of Munsey’s. Davis acknowledged Walrond’s talent but rejected the stories.
He has [a] genius for color; I never saw better atmosphere in anything. Of course he is violently irreverent. I can use nothing of the manuscripts enclosed. He has let down the barriers without reserve. It grieves me to let these manuscripts go back to you. In spite of which I am much concerned about his future. […] Nobody understands so well as he the people about whom he writes. I await with eagerness your consent to help. I have no doubt there are many magazines that would publish these stories without changing a syllable. However, I cannot with safety present these bald though brilliant descriptions of men and women and manners—or the lack of manners, whichever you choose.1
When they met, Davis persuaded Walrond to write two stories for his other publication, a pulp weekly, Argosy’s All Story. They were likely the “disgusting darky stories” to which Walrond referred in “Adventures in Misunderstanding.” But it was not the last effort Underwood made on his behalf, broadening his contacts beyond the black community. She was one of three people Walrond had the good fortune to impress in 1923. The others were Casper Holstein, a Harlem real estate baron, and William McFee, an English writer and ship’s engineer. Each helped redirect Walrond’s career as his disillusionment with Garveyism deepened.
Unhappy in the Garvey movement and his marriage, Walrond had deserted both in the late spring of 1923, signing on to work aboard a ship bound for the Caribbean. “I went to sea,” he said, “It is the easiest way to—to forget things” (“Godless” 33). With McFee as chief engineer and Walrond a cook’s helper, the ship made port calls from New Orleans to Cartagena. Walrond’s voyage profoundly influenced the fledgling writer’s development. The settings of several early stories are traceable to this journey, and McFee was a valuable mentor. He discussed Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti as models for writing about tropical places, and he suggested Walrond acquire an agent, recommending Underwood.2 “I lived!” Walrond declared, “I saw life lived!” (“Godless” 33). Nevertheless, Underwood claimed he was disconsolate when they first met. It is difficult to trust her account, which, despite being among the fullest recollections of Walrond’s early career, is riddled with inaccuracies.
One day he phoned my secretary and asked to come out. He told me he was sad, homesick for the south, and miserable here in the north where he did not know which way to turn for the work he needed. […] He asked me to suggest something that would help him get steady work, a living of sorts, telling me that he had tried newspaper work a little both in Panama and in Harlem. […] I told him he talked unusually well and I believed if he wrote some stories of the tropic home he missed so, with all the homesick eloquence with which he related his memories to me, they might have success. But he had no place in which to write, and he had nothing to live on. Then he called up Caspar Holstein, rich man of Harlem, who had been born in the Virgin Islands and now was owner of a fleet of ships and was noted for his generosity, his unstinted help to his race. I assured him that Walrond had unusual talent and that all he needed was a little chance to unfold that talent. Holstein […] was his usual greathearted self. He offered him a place to live in his own home, provided him with a finely furnished room, and an allowance. Here young Walrond set about writing his stories—many stories—all of which I had him rewrite again and again; things of charm usually, all of them pulsing with the life of his sensitive responsive youth then at its height. He wrote diligently for months just as I had suggested, bringing the stories to me one after the other. I sent him with a letter of introduction to Bob Davis, whose judgment in the short story art has a certain amount of finality.3
Without her intervention, Underwood suggests, Walrond would have toiled away in penury and obscurity. Instead, “over-night he became famous. Praise and social honours were his, together with a secure and considerable income.” But a candid assessment reveals the significance of other factors—a 1924 Civic Club dinner at which Walrond and others met New York’s publishing establishment; his work with Charles Johnson at Opportunity; Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), featuring a story by Walrond; and the collection of what Underwood calls “the stories” into Tropic Death. Far from having “tried newspaper work a little,” Walrond’s journalism was a bridge to his fiction writing, a point made as early as 1928, when the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences named him among the journalists who midwifed “the birth of the so-called New Negro” in literature.4 Overstating her role as his savior, Underwood neglected the role of the community in which Walrond was immersed; she omitted the New Negro movement.
White patronage has a thorny legacy in Harlem Renaissance historiography, and Walrond’s relationship with Underwood was unconventional.5 A wealthy white woman twenty-five years his senior, she was not his social equal, but assistance did not flow in one direction alone. In Underwood’s view, African American writing infused vitality into a Western tradition that could no longer rely simply on white writers. Casting the deficiencies of Anglo-America in explicitly racial terms, she announced at the first Opportunity banquet, “Joy—its mainspring—is dying in the Great Caucasian race.”6 She was not alone in prescribing black “vitality” and “joy” as remedies for the overcivilization of Anglo-America. “The Negro” figured centrally in the critique of Anglo-America from white bohemians and other detractors of genteel values. If she saw in Walrond a glimmer of the joy “Negroes” could contribute, it may have been a projection, but it also registered her dissent from the exaltation of the “Great Caucasian race” enjoying pernicious currency at the time.
Walrond credited Underwood for encouraging him, reading drafts, and contacting friends on his behalf. She sent him an excerpt from her latest book on translation, and he sent her his “Developed and Undeveloped Negro Literature” essay. “I am also taking the liberty of sending you a short story of mine,” he added, “which, I think, is illustrative of the sort of writing I would some day like to do.”7 When Underwood offered to send his story to a fellow writer and critic, he wrote to say he was “deeply indebted.”
I think your plan is excellent, flattering to say the least, and I don’t know how to thank you for your wonderful interest and generosity. I think I’ve done about ten stories already. […] Were it not for the fact that I hate to overload you with my literary troubles, I’d put them in shape and send them to you, and if you think them worthwhile, then we could get together and see about sending them to the publisher of whom you spoke.
In the next two months Walrond wrote “The Consul’s Clerk,” “The Godless City,” “Voodoo Vengeance,” and “The Wharf Rats.” “I have tried to put my best foot forward in these stories of Panama,” he told her, “and I earnestly hope they will measure up to the standard required for admission to Mr. Bob Davis’ ‘Munsey’s.’”8
They did not measure up, but Walrond and Underwood had other irons in the fire. He introduced her to Negro World readers through his review of her novel The Penitent.9 Three consecutive issues included her translations of Alexander Pushkin’s reflections on his African ancestry. She helped him place “On Being Black” in The New Republic, where she knew the editor Robert Herrick. Much of what Walrond published the following year was facilitated by Underwood, including pieces in Current History, The Smart Set, and The International Interpreter, a highbrow weekly. This work, in conjunction with his New Republic reviews, shifted Walrond’s audience and authorial status. In the subsequent two years, his readership expanded to the New York Herald Tribune, Forbes, Vanity Fair, The Independent, Brentano’s Book Chat, and the Saturday Review of Literature. Underwood and McFee were invaluable as Walrond crossed into the mainstream, among the first African American writers of his generation to do so.
But the crossover was neither linear nor complete. Like most African American journalists who achieved a measure of mainstream success, Walrond continued to publish primarily in black periodicals. It was the black community that sustained him, even when paychecks came from elsewhere. Walrond left Negro World in the spring of 1923, but it was not a transition from black to white, as he placed work in The Crisis, The Messenger, and Opportunity, the last of which offered him a staff position. Nor do McFee and Underwood deserve all the credit; Alain Locke and Charles Johnson advocated for Walrond and his peers, launching careers that straddled the color line. Finally, Walrond’s own gift as a pitchman for his work should not be underestimated. “He made his own contacts,” said Ethel Ray Nance.
He would go out and seek editors and publishers, show them his work rather than rely on friends or agents or other people, other sources. […] He had a newsman’s sense of timing. He would know when an article should be written and what the subject should be, and he’d busy himself and write a whole evening and go downtown the next day and usually would find a market for his article.10
A point about Walrond’s transition to mainstream publications bears emphasis. Walrond’s break with Garveyism could be seen as an expression of Americanization and an increasing identification with African Americans.11 The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), with its foreign-born officers and militant ideology, was widely understood as anti-American. Breaking with Garvey and writing for rival publications, Walrond embraced different literary values and a different cultural agenda. But the transition did not constitute a disavowal. The trappings of the greenhorn may appear to be cast off: a foreign-born social movement repudiated, a foreign-born wife returned home, an interest in the immigrant experience succeeded by an interest in African American experience. But this narrative suppresses many features of Walrond’s career as he maintained multiple affiliations, troubling a linear narrative of acculturation. Even as his expressions of Americanness became explicit and his fondness for Harlem grew, he maintained a West Indian identity, experimenting on the page with a range of voices and deepening his analysis of the African diaspora in the plural Americas.
CASPER HOLSTEIN AND CRITICAL INTERNATIONALISM
In early 1922, Negro World published an unsigned editorial condemning the U.S. government’s conduct in the Virgin Islands. Its author was one of Harlem’s Virgin Islanders. “When I was on the staff of Negro World,” Walrond recalled, “Casper Holstein came to me with an article he had written” in rejoinder to sketches T. S. Stribling had published.
Mr. Holstein, who had just returned from six months’ trip to the islands […] felt that the author of Birthright had not told the whole truth in regard to the actual labor, racial, and political conditions there. I had the “temerity” to publish the article, which was the first of a series of blows Casper Holstein struck and is still continuing to strike in defense of the manhood of the Virgin Islanders. (“Says” 1)
Walrond’s account of Holstein as an astute political actor departs from established histories that depict him as a crooked philanthropist. Holstein infamously operated the Harlem numbers racket, an underground lottery, but his shrewd political analysis and commitment to Caribbean self-determination impressed Walrond. His critique of U.S. imperialism demonstrated a racial militancy that aligned him with the UNIA.12 Conditions under U.S. occupation were not well-known, but Holstein and Harrison exposed the U.S. agenda, seeking representation for Virgin Islanders in local government and in Washington. A tidy narrative of Walrond’s conversion from Garveyite to aesthete, West Indian to American, separatist to integrationist, misses the investment he maintained in Caribbean struggles.
4.1 Photograph of Casper Holstein, 1926, photographer unknown.
Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Courtesy of the National Urban League, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life.
As Walrond’s faith in Garvey wavered, Holstein inspired him. He emphasized Holstein’s modesty, implying a contrast to Garvey’s arrogance.
When it comes to spending money for a cause, to doing things for people without hoping for reward, when it comes to being the receiver of ungratefulness of the most disillusioning kind, of shouldering a burden that is growing larger and larger with the rising of each sun, you have to go to hand it to Casper Holstein. […] And, much to his credit, Casper Holstein is the poorest, the rottenest self-advertiser in the world. […] He is contemptuous of the limelight. (“Says” 1)
Holstein represented a different sort of leader, and if Walrond’s account tended toward hyperbole, it underscored his dilemma in 1922.13 Disillusioned with the UNIA, he was wary of all race leaders, not just Garvey. His friendship with Holstein developed in the context of this perceived crisis of leadership, which he discussed in Current History in 1923.
“The New Negro Faces America” excoriated Garvey, the first time Walrond did so in print. But he was no kinder to other race leaders. The article seemed at first to follow a formula: establish the urgency of the race problem, identify the deficiencies of Du Bois, Washington, and others, then recommend Garvey as the solution. But Walrond flipped the script. “The negro is at the crossroads of American life,” he began, “He is, probably more than any other group within our borders, the most vigorously ‘led.’” Garvey was preferable, he conceded, to Du Bois or Booker T. Washington’s successors. But after enumerating Garvey’s improbable success, Walrond went off-script, accusing him of “preposterous mistakes.” As a result, “a reaction set in. The crowds who once flocked to hear how he was going to redeem Africa have begun to dwindle.” The hard fact was, “the Negroes of America do not want to go back to Africa.” Africa may “mean something racial, if not spiritual” to “the thinking ones” among them, but most are indifferent to the colonization scheme, “the salient feature of Garvey’s propaganda.” “To them Africa is a dream—an unrealizable dream. In America, despite its ‘Jim-Crow’ laws, they see something beautiful” (788). Most damning of all, he called Garvey a “megalomaniac” (787). The gauntlet had been thrown down.
Where did this leave African Americans? Walrond pinned his hopes on a distributed model of progress, the gains ordinary African Americans made in the professions, industry, and the arts, not on a charismatic individual or vanguard program. He documented sharp increases in the amount and value of property owned by African Americans but argued that the truest indicator of “the outlook for the negro” was his “mental state.” In valuing disposition over data, Walrond expressed as much about his own mental state as about the “new negro” for whom he claimed to speak.
Though there are thousands of college-bred negroes working as janitors and bricklayers and railroad car porters, there are still more thousands in colleges and universities who are fitting themselves well to become architects, engineers, chemists, manufacturers. The new negro, who does not want to go back to Africa, is fondly cherishing an ideal—and that is, that the time will come when America will look upon the negro not as a savage with an inferior mentality, but as a civilized man. The American negro of today believes intensely in America. […] He is pinning everything on the hope, illusion or not, that America will someday find its soul, forget the negro’s black skin, and recognize him as one of the nation’s most loyal sons and defenders. (788)
This was a dramatic break with Garveyism, the formulation of a “new negro” sensibility drawn from his own tentative embrace of integration and cultural pluralism.
As Walrond’s reference to the “new negro” indicates, the phrase had entered the popular lexicon before Locke made it the title of his anthology.14 It had a nationalist connotation, but Walrond was among those who insisted on the term’s critical internationalism. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen called the New Negro “the product of the same world wide forces that have brought into being the great liberal and radical movements that are now seizing the reins of political, economic, and social power in all of the civilized countries of the world.”15 For Walrond, the task was to represent the challenges and opportunities facing people of African descent, remaining alert to the specificity of African American experience without obscuring the common threads of the black Atlantic: relocation and enslavement, colonialism, violence and exploitation, resistance and rebellion, cultural and linguistic syncretism. His vision was no longer grounded in an immutable antagonism between white and black, the UNIA’s binary construct. The struggle of the “Negro” in Babylon yielded to an account in which ethnicity, nation, language, class, and culture constituted a field whose complexity was not apprehended by race alone. Walrond’s hope that “America will some day find its soul” and recognize the “Negro” as “one of its most loyal sons and defenders” did not prevent him from upbraiding the United States, which was engaged in neocolonial projects in the Caribbean and beyond.
In fact, in another Current History essay, Walrond argued that U.S. rule resembled the English administration of Crown Colonies and was in some ways worse for the islands’ residents. “From a strategic point of view,” Walrond wrote, “the Virgin Islands are necessary to the safety and protection of the Panama Canal and also to American interests in the Antilles” (221). But its “temporary Government” had come to resemble Haiti and the Dominican Republic, both under U.S. Navy occupation.16 Three deleterious results followed: racism was “aggravated” by the imposition of Jim Crow, local industry was undercut by Prohibition policies, and democracy was thwarted at every turn. This essay, “Autocracy in the Virgin Islands,” politicized a region North Americans associated with palm trees and azure skies. Although it resembled Walrond’s work in Negro World, the tone diverged sharply, trading incendiary rhetoric for dispassionate analysis. His approach abided by Current History’s mission, to provide “a survey of the important events of the world, told by those most competent to present them; the FACTS of today’s history impartially related, without bias, criticism, or editorial comment.” The other mainstream venue in which Walrond began publishing, The International Interpreter, professed a similar commitment to impartiality and geographic scope.17 Neither the Interpreter nor Current History indulged in special pleading on behalf of “Negroes,” about whom articles were scarce. But because of Walrond’s adept framing of race in relation to national and international matters, he succeeded in placing five investigative reports in the Interpreter in one year. Several shared the theme of migration—two on Caribbean migration to the United States, two on African American migration—while another, “Inter-Racial Cooperation in the South,” developed the proposition that mutual understanding across the color line was possible and desirable; it could be engineered to benefit the nation as a whole.
Despite the platform the Interpreter and Current History provided, their injunction for objectivity did not satisfy his political militancy or his interest in linguistic innovation and narrative form. These found expression in his final publications in Negro World, stylized accounts of conversations he had in Guatemala and Havana. Both decried race prejudice in the United States by contrasting it with amicable race relations in other parts of the world. But what stands out is the subordination of argument to characterization and atmospherics.
Along el Avenida Italia old ragged brown women smoking Ghanga weed—“it mek you smaht lek a flea”—huddled up against picturesque dwellings. Taxis filled with carnivalling crowds sped by. Foreign seamen staggered half-drunk out of Casas Francesas. Doggoning the heat, Babbitt and silk-sweatered Myra clung desperately to flasks of honest-to-goodness Bacardi. Bewitching senoritas in opera wraps of white and orange and scintillating brown stept out of gorgeous limousines.18
The ostensible focus of the essay is an encounter with an expatriate African American, an elderly man from Georgia who, after eight years in Havana, renounced the land of Jim Crow. Competing with the overt subject is Walrond’s irrepressible narrative voice, for the sketch is also about himself. “Nostalgically I dug into the bowels of the dingy callecitas. Something, I don’t know what drew me, led me on. Was it the glamour of the tropical sky, the hot, voluptuous night, the nectar of Felipe’s cebada? Or maybe the intriguing echo of Mademoiselle’s ‘Martinique! Hola, Martinique!’ as the taxi skidaddled around the corner? It was all of these and more.”19 The real subject is Walrond’s persistent romance with the Caribbean port city. However awkwardly, these sketches wed the political militancy that drew Walrond to Negro World with a romantic attachment to “the folk” and a propensity for formal experimentation that unfit him to continue there. The sketches also speak to Walrond’s ongoing concern with the varieties of black experience in Latin America. Walrond’s work in early 1923 all points to the importance of a critical internationalism in understanding race relations in the United States.
Eager to embrace New York, Walrond nevertheless remained proud of his Caribbeanness and convinced of its value to a movement that often assumed nationalist lines. He began to see the United States as the proverbial land of opportunity, evincing unprecedented enthusiasm, but his transnational sensibility was at odds with the prevailing rhetoric of race.20 With a hemispheric perspective, “Walrond understood as early as the 1920s what it meant to say that the Caribbean was, in modernity, an American sea,” notes Michelle Stephens, “The presence of the U.S. as an economic force in the Caribbean, and a political force in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, meant a story of economic and cultural integration.”21 His effort to maintain both sides of his cultural identity—the British West Indian and the American “Negro”—is evident in his work throughout this period. One manifestation was his ambivalence about becoming a U.S. citizen; he applied for “first papers” in 1923 but never completed the process. From the perspective of literary history, however, the significant expressions of his attempt to hold Americanness and Caribbeanness in tension occur in his work. A tight-knit community sustained Walrond during this period of dawning recognition of both his extraordinary talent and his psychological fragility.
OUR LITTLE GROUP
Gwendolyn Bennett was an early friend of Walrond’s in New York, and a visual artist, poet, and prose writer. Remembered for artwork in Opportunity and The Crisis and her column “The Ebony Flute,” she also taught at Howard University and published in The New Negro and Fire!! She was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she and Walrond grew close in the early 1920s, supporting each other’s endeavors and working together at Opportunity. They were kindred spirits with immense mutual admiration. Walrond called her Gwennie and said in 1946 that she was “the closest approximation to a favourite sister I have ever had.”22 One of his first sketches for Opportunity was inspired by a scandal she and her friends provoked at Girls’ High School by integrating their prom, an event Bennett memorialized by clipping coverage from local papers.
4.2 Photograph of Gwendolyn Bennett, c. 1920, photographer unknown.
Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Walrond wrote “Cynthia Goes to the Prom” in late 1923, illustrating a Brooklyn girl’s discovery of race consciousness. Before the prom, Cynthia never felt her color was an impediment. Blessed with “nerve,” she was popular at a school “where Irish, Jew, Italian, and Anglo-Saxon mixed,” she “always came out at or very near the top” academically, and the boys, who “first stared askance at the ebony locks that adorn her bronze temples […] before you knew it, ‘took’ completely to her” (342). When our chivalrous narrator offers to accompany her to the prom, he accidentally initiates her into the ways of white prejudice. The eight “Negroes” stay “silently composed,” frustrating the three hundred guests who “all trotted out to see what we looked like.” “Nobody stumbled over the carpet. Nobody tripped. In fact, I think I saw a look of disappointment on some of our spectators’ faces. Some of them had come for a good hearty lung-expanding laugh. But they didn’t get it” (343). A showdown ensues at the cloakroom, where the clerk “hasn’t any more hooks left,” says Cynthia, “so she says she’d have to put our coats on the floor.” “I looked at the lady in charge,” Walrond writes, “Her face barked at me. Her green eyes spat fire. She was ready to fight, to fly at our throats” (343). The same classmates whose favor Cynthia enjoys at school now snub her, and the narrator poses a loaded question at the evening’s end: “What do you think of social equality now?” “Not much,” she replies, “I tell you one thing, though—whenever I get a chance I’m going to these affairs. They’ve got to get used to us! They must!” The sketch concludes with the narrator marveling that such conviction had come from a former “disciple of passivism” (343). Walrond does not declare the futility of changing white folks’ views, as he might have earlier, he instead admires Cynthia’s resolve to pursue integration and equality. By late 1923, he had determined that the United States would be an ideal place if color were not such a universal preoccupation, not just among whites but also African Americans.
His satire of American color consciousness, “Vignettes of the Dusk,” laments that someplace so wonderful could be so afflicted with a debilitating color fixation. Set in Wall Street, “the heart of America’s financial seraglio,” the sketch has Walrond contemplating lunch at an inexpensive diner and “the most democratic eating place I know. There is no class prejudice; no discrimination; newsboys, bootblacks, factory slaves, all eat at Max’s” (19). But it is payday and he feels “flush,” entertaining romantic notions of America’s promise: “Rich, I am extravagant today. I rub elbows with bankers and millionaires and comely office girls. Of seraphs and madrigals I dream—nut that I am. I look up at the sparkling gems of architecture and marvel at the beauty that is America. America!” (19). He chooses someplace swanky, resplendent with “swinging doors and chocolate puffs in the show case,” “mirrors, flowers, paintings, candelabra; waiters in gowns as white as alabaster,” and two delicacies on the menu: oyster salad and a dessert suggestively named “vanilla temptation.” But the reverie is broken by a racial incident, something amiss when the waiter brings his order. “Couldn’t he just hand it to me over there instead of having to come all the way round the counter to make sure it gets into my hands? Couldn’t he have saved himself all that trouble?” But the waiter is not accommodating Walrond, he is ensuring that a signal of opprobrium is delivered discreetly.
He is at my side. Stern and white-lipped he hands me a nice brown paper bag with dusky flowers on it. He holds it off with the tips of his fingers as if its contents were leprous. “Careful,” he warns farsightedly, “else you’ll spill the temptation.” I do not argue. Sepulchrally I pay the check and waltz out. It is the equivalent of being shooed out. And, listen folks, he was careful not to say, “No, we don’t serve no colored here.” (19)
If this were its only episode, “Vignettes of the Dusk” would resemble Walrond’s early journalism: fulminating against racial slights, denials of the “vanilla temptation.” But it is distinguished by its celebration of American promise, opportunity qualified only by its fixation with color.
With mainstream publications, Walrond found his reputation enhanced and began thinking of himself in 1923 as a writer of real promise. This affirmation was nourished by his association with the 135th Street public library. Bennett saved a report of one event in which they shared space on the bill. Entitled “Poet’s Evening: A Real Library Treat,” the article conveys the frisson of a movement emerging from its chrysalis.23 And although Bennett had her own reasons for saving the article—it said she stole the show—Walrond memorialized the evening differently. Employing the sardonic voice he adopted to cover the Van Doren lecture, his article bore a portentous, defensive title, “My Version of It.” “‘Of what?’ you ask, bewildered. Of the to-do at the young writers’ evening at the library Wednesday night” (4). Audience members objected to his risqué treatment of women.
After the poets […] got through with their “poetical effusions”—Arthur Schomburg’s words—it devolved on us to read a story of Negro life. In the first place, the title had a tendency to prejudice those who heard it against the author. “Woman.” Woman, woman, woman—Well, for the first two pages it went off all right. Then, tip-toeing, one, two, three ladies crept out. On we read. In turning a page we caught Dorothy Friedman’s violet eyes. “Louder,” her lips pantomimed; “I can’t hear you.” On we read. On, on, on … Until the end came. Arthur Schomburg, at the behest of the chairlady, was the first to illude us. “I didn’t know that fellow Walrond had such a keen pair of eyes. Now, the point about the purple chemise—”The point about the purple chemise is the point they won’t let us print. (4)
The grumbling that ensued was audible, prompting the chief librarian to come to his defense.
In the breaking up of the crowd we got a glimpse of the way they reacted to “Woman.” “Is he really as bad as all that, Miss Rose?”
“I don’t think so,” Miss Rose responded spiritedly.
“Well,” she condescended to come over to us, “Well, I enjoyed yours too.”
“Shake!” cried Joe Gould. “I’ll buy you a cup of black coffee, so help me! I sure envy you your courage.”
“And to think—that ending—wasn’t it awful? And there was a minister in the audience besides! Wasn’t that terrible—to think—to think—”
“Lewd! Licentious! Full of passion! Terrible!”
“And that ending! My gawd! I almost blushed!”
“I don’t know what’s come over our men. Story about white men and colored women—and white men in the audience! Didn’t you see how that white man turned and whispered to the girl with him?” (4)
As the article chronicles his contentious reception, it engages in a peculiar sort of performance, reveling in the terms in which the audience applauded or clucked. It celebrates his self-fashioning as someone willing to offend moralistic listeners.
This posture of irreverence aligned Walrond with those who would soon mount the short-lived journal Fire!! They frankly addressed sexuality, interracial relationships, and vulgarity, matters that were still taboo among those anxious to improve white opinion of African Americans. Walrond saw a new generation resisting this “vigilantly censorious” impulse: “They are writing of the Negro multitude […] in such a style that people will stop and remark, Why, I thought I knew Negroes, but if I am to credit this story here I guess I don’t.” In a wonderful flourish, Walrond advocated “going into the lives of typical folks—people who don’t have to wait till the pig knuckly parson says good-bye and goes out the gate before they can be themselves” (“Negro Literati” 32–33). If he did not wait for the departure of the “pig knuckly parson” to read suggestive passages about purple chemises, Walrond did feel compelled to subject the tut-tutting of his detractors to satirical treatment. He was sensitive, took insults to heart, and could be aggressive in print.
The 135th Street library was a proving ground, and Walrond made an indelible impression. The discussions did not stop at the door nor was a clear line drawn between socializing and developing one’s craft. Regina Anderson, a librarian and writer, shared an apartment at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue with Louella Tucker and Ethel Ray Nance, hosting salons and extending hospitality to many aspiring artists who were moving to New York or passing through. Walrond became a fixture. “The 580 trio was excited by Walrond,” writes David Levering Lewis, by “his accented, rippling wit, his urbanity and fearless independence.”24 Among a group of regulars that included Cullen, Bennett, Hughes, and Harold Jackman, a Harlem schoolteacher, Walrond was a charismatic presence. Nance recalled, “You would think of him as being tall,” but “he may not have been six feet. [H]e was of slight build, had flashing eyes, his face was very alert and very alive.” She described his vitality and magnetism.
He was very pleasant, but as soon as he entered a room, you knew he was there. He moved very quickly, he couldn’t stay still and in one place, especially if he was excited, and he was excited most of the time. Either he had met someone or else he had a new idea about something and he would have to walk up and down when he described it or when he talked to you. He had quite a way of meeting strangers, anyone who ever met him remembered him.25
It was due as much to these personal qualities as to his talent that Walrond gained a wide acquaintance, in Harlem and downtown. He became a catalyst for the New Negro movement, “A person that held our little group together and built it,” said Nance, “because he had the faculty of bringing in interesting people and meeting interesting people. If Eric walked down the street, someone interesting was bound to show up.”26
Among the most interesting of Walrond’s acquaintances was Holstein, who was unwelcome at 580.27 The banker for Harlem’s illicit numbers racket, he “combined the prosaic traits of a financier with the dizzy imaginative flights of a fingerless Midas.”28 Holstein financed Opportunity contests and supported Walrond so generously that he dedicated Tropic Death to him.29 If Holstein was too disreputable for the 580 set, Walrond’s other close friend, Countée Cullen, was a pillar of respectability. Cullen was not wealthy, the adopted son of a Baptist minister in Harlem, but he was exceedingly proper. He was candid about his elitism: “I am not at all a democratic person,” he wrote Jackman in 1923, “I believe in an aristocracy of the soul.”30 Jackman was handsome, bright, and popular, and his relationship with Cullen was intimate, leading to jealousy among their peers, especially Walrond. Cullen expressed concern to Jackman: “So Walrond feels jealous of our friendship? Well, other people do too. I am wondering whether Walrond received the letter I sent him nearly two weeks ago. He has not answered. […] When you see him mention it to him, and if he did not receive the letter, secure me his address that I may write to him. I don’t want him to feel slighted.”31 His kind concern for Walrond’s feelings was matched by his admiration for his talent. “When the August [1923] Crisis comes out, be sure to get it,” he told Jackman, “The issue will be devoted to the younger Negro literati, and […] I wonder if Walrond will be represented. He ought to be.” In fact, Walrond was represented, and although his contribution took the modest form of an article on an Afro-Spanish painter, Cullen’s sense that his friend belonged in any showcase of “younger Negro literati” was now widely held.
The clearest illustration was the arrival in 1923 of the most prolific period in his career to date, with eight publications: a short story and two sketches, four articles, and a review essay. His sketches were the first works of fiction to appear in Opportunity. “On Being a Domestic” recounts the trials and tribulations of a hotel service worker at whom white patrons hurl epithets, glower, even expectorate “a cataract of saliva” (234). It was among Walrond’s efforts to highlight the plight of servitude and express the attending “passionate feeling of revolt.” Published in the next issue of Opportunity, “The Stone Rebounds” was equally fatalistic: “It is useless trying to run up against a stonewall—a Gibraltar of prejudice. Useless!” (277). Walrond’s bitterness during this period is even more pronounced in “Miss Kenny’s Marriage,” a satirical story without one sympathetic character. This may have recommended it to Mencken, the acerbic editor of The Smart Set. It was a fable eviscerating social pretensions in Brooklyn’s African American community, inviting readers to join him in a laugh at his characters’ expense. These are Miss Kenny, a beautician with a propensity for self-aggrandizing prevarications, and her suitor, the young lawyer Elias Ramsey. The story is a ribald portrait of 1920s black Brooklyn. But as the tale unfolds and it becomes clear that the quiet but unscrupulous Ramsey is fleecing Miss Kenny of all ten thousand of her hard-earned dollars, one wonders what exactly the author is after. Is it the pleasure of seeing the pretentious Miss Kenny brought low? Is it a cautionary tale about the perils of entering lightly into the pecuniary arrangement of marriage, a subject that was on the mind of its recently separated author? Neither interpretation rings quite true, for Ramsey is no more virtuous than Miss Kenny, whose fall is thus difficult to relish. Nor does the story offer an alternative to conventional marriage, making the cautionary tale incomplete. Instead, it might be understood as a trickster narrative.
From the outset, Miss Kenny is established as fatuous and haughty, an easy mark for the trickster. We are made to understand that she lies routinely and effectively. “Not that Miss Kenny was a four-flusher in the ordinary sense of the word. Heavens, no! She simply delighted in beating around the bush and misleading folks as to her personal affairs” (150).32 On “the matter of money” she was given to fabrication. “Yes, Miss Kenny had money. Of course she could never admit it. She always made it a point to impress strangers (and friends alike) with her utter destitution” (151). And though she was not “a member of the olive-skinned aristocracy of Brooklyn, there was evidence abundant to testify to the esteem in which she was held by, as she pertly expressed it, ‘gangs and gangs of folks’” (158). She is contemptuous of “niggers,” though of course she uses this term to refer strictly to a certain class, those whose coarseness reflects poorly on the race. “There ain’t none of the nigger in me, honey,” she tells a customer (153). When she hears that people are asking why she is still “doing heads” since she has married and can afford to retire, she declares, “That is just like us cullud folks. I tell you, girlie, I am not like a lot of these new niggers you see floating around here. A few hundred dollars don’t frighten me. Only we used-to-nothing cullud folks lose our heads and stick out our chests at sight of a few red pennies” (159). Thus, it is not surprising that the trickster who ruins her comes in the guise of a refined gentleman. “Miss Kenny’s Marriage” probably appealed to The Smart Set because of its jaundiced tone but also because it departed from the well-worn paths of propagandistic and sentimental fiction. Willingness to air the race’s dirty laundry was taken by many as the sign of mature confidence, a repudiation of the “inferiority complex,” and a commitment to authenticity over public relations. Miss Kenny, apparently a recent arrival from the South, calls her customers “honey,” “girlie, and “chile,” and Walrond orchestrates diction and syntax to suggest fidelity to “Negro” speech. But to read the story for its realism—its warts-and-all treatment of black New Yorkers—is to miss its affinity with other trickster tales, from Chesnutt’s “conjure stories,” to the tales of Br’er Goat and Anansi the Spider recited in the West Indian communities of Walrond’s youth.
Putting it this way reveals continuities that characterize Walrond’s early fiction, which otherwise seems to divide neatly between stories about New York and about the Caribbean. In subsequent months, five of his Caribbean stories appeared. Informed by his recent sea voyage, they included three in mainstream weeklies and two in Opportunity. All invoke obeah, voodoo, or another form of conjure, and three involve tricksters who steal the show.
CARIBBEAN STORIES
Composed in 1923, these five stories were a dress rehearsal for Tropic Death, anticipating that book’s tremendous vitality as well as its weaknesses. They are transnational and multilingual—representing the region’s startling diversity to an audience largely unacquainted—and generically hybrid, blending travel narrative conventions with pulp fiction and Afro-Caribbean folklore. Like Tropic Death, they drew on Walrond’s experiences in Panama and suggest the profound impact of the United States in the Caribbean, more often through ironic gestures than overt arguments. The concern for narrative detail that Tropic Death exhibits is evident in these stories, but above all they dramatize the tension between the natural and the supernatural, reason and unreason, that Tropic Death would treat as distinctively Caribbean. Walrond could not afford to write literary fiction and, unlike Tropic Death, these stories—two of which appeared in Opportunity, two in Argosy All-Story Weekly, and one in Success Magazine—were not intended to challenge readers but to entertain them and earn their author a paycheck. The circumstances of his departure from the UNIA are unclear, but he was no longer writing for Negro World and not yet on staff at Opportunity. The stories sought to appeal to U.S. readers despite esoteric cultural references and unflattering depictions of white Americans. For this reason, they exhibit a jarring double discourse: a discourse of tropicality, structured by oppositions between civilization and barbarism, culture and nature; and a discourse of coloniality, the insider’s perspective that renders real Caribbean lives, subverting the exoticizing gaze of the outsider.33 It was not until Tropic Death that Walrond coordinated these discourses with sufficient skill that they became mutually transformative rather than discordant.
These stories’ protagonists are all Afro-Caribbean. In “The Godless City,” Ezekiel Yates is a Jamaican who arrived in Panama in the 1880s and worked as captain’s assistant on an American gunboat. In “The Silver King,” Salambo is Puerto Rican, an aspiring poet whose fiancée lives in Guatemala, where his ship is headed. “The Voodoo’s Revenge” features Salambo’s anagram, Sambola, a St. Lucian, servant to the manager of the West Indian Telegraph Company, and another Afro-Caribbean, Nestor Villaine, editor of a Panamanian newspaper. In “The Stolen Necklace” Santiago is a Barbadian whose six years in Colón “duly Latinized” him and landed him a job at the Isthmian Canal Commission. Finally, the character most closely modeled on the author is Enrique, protagonist of the only first-person story, “A Cholo Romance.” A resident of Bottle Alley, Walrond’s own street, Enrique is a Colón businessman with political connections and a West Indian whose blackness makes him a despised chombo in the eyes of his mother-in-law to be.
These stories all undertake a generic masquerade. Walrond depicts the folkways and geography of Panama and the Caribbean, but his narrative voice and plot conventions come from hard-boiled pulp fiction. Men match wits and exploit one another’s vulnerability, which is almost invariably occasioned by too fervent an attachment to a woman. Salambo, Santiago, and Enrique are all blinded by their love for Latina damsels, while Nestor Villaine is blinded by his desire for revenge. In this vulnerable state, they are targets for the tricksters and agents of deception who populate the tales. Santiago tries to bamboozle a U.S. Marine eager to make some quick cash but finds in the end that he has gained a wife and lost a fortune. Sambola also winds up betrothed and missing a trunk of silver that he thought was his wedding gift. Enrique calls in a debt from a friend to help him outwit Br’er Goat, only to find himself engaged to Br’er Goat’s daughter at the story’s end. And Nestor Villaine, who enlists the services of an obeah expert to thwart his nemesis the governor, ends up a meal for the sharks in Limón Bay. In this genre, plot development could be finessed with melodrama and meaning could be retrofitted onto clumsily executed plots through ironic conclusions, preposterous epiphanies that resolve the narratives that precede them and excuse their deficiencies.
Walrond employed these dime story conventions in part because they were expected in magazines such as Argosy and Success but also because he grew up reading them. Enrique of “A Cholo Romance” is an avid reader of Dick Turpin, an English pulp series, and he speaks like one:
After getting as much fun as it is possible to get out of watching a wet canary dry itself in the sun, I stuck my head between the leaves of a Dick Turpin yarn. Black Bess had just jumped off one of London’s tallest skyscrapers, and Dick, eluding his captors, was Johnny-on-the-spot as the shining steed landed on its feet. With his usual dash he leaped into the saddle and in a jiffy was lost from view! (178)
Walrond illustrated his youthful enthusiasm for dime novels in “The Voodoo’s Revenge,” where he credits such reading with firing the imagination. Mr. Newbold, the story’s least sympathetic character, takes his “office boy,” Sambola, for a “faithful and obedient servant” because unlike his other employees Sambola “never smoked or whistled or stayed out late at nights or read ‘Old Sleuth,’ ‘Dick Turpin,’ or ‘Dead Wood Dick.’ He hadn’t any imagination. That, Mr. Newbold felt, was good for him” (212).
The minstrel figure was another feature of pulp magazines, where nonwhite characters rarely escaped the broad brushstrokes of caricature. “The Silver King” makes overt recourse to this convention. The title character, an African American southerner whose job is to care for the ship’s silverware, is ostentatiously proud of his work, which is, after all, quite mundane.
Chest thrown back, tall, black, majestic, the Silver King, a Mississippi roustabout, walked with the dignity befitting a man of his nautical station. More than any other member of the crew […] he was physically and metaphysically best suited for his treasure hoarding job. As guardian of the ship’s silver and basking in the sunlight of the grandiloquent title of “Silver King,” it devolved on him to hand out to the waiters and stewards at mealtime the sterling cups and dishes and knives and forks and sheeny platters. In this he ruled like a tyrant. (291)
When Silver King opens his mouth, out pour malapropisms, mispronunciations, and other deformations of standard English. “Say, where dat spoon come from at? […] Well, lissen, pardner, dis joint shets down at six—six sharp—and lissen, pardner, I gots orders from de boss not to recept nothin’ from nobody no time atter that. So gwan!” (291–92). His retorts are floridly metaphorical. “Say, lissen, tie dat bull outside. You can’t hand me none o’ dat gaff. Ma name ain’t Green. Wha’ do ya think I bin gwine ter sea all dese years fo’? I ain’t no monkey chaser” (294).
Insisting he is no “monkey chaser,” Silver King uses a pejorative term for West Indians. But in an ironic inversion, it is Silver King’s speech that Walrond marks, while Salambo, who is not only Caribbean but also a native Spanish speaker, somehow delivers lines in impeccable English. “I am going to get married,” he tells Silver King. “Zat so? Well, wouldn’t dat kill ya?” replies Silver King, “Marry! Wha’ fo’?” “You don’t understand, Silver King. Elisa is a lady—a nice Spanish lady—and I love her. She has consented to marry me” (294). It is an interesting choice for a West Indian writing in a mainstream publication. Walrond establishes Salambo as a “Negro” (one crewmember calls him the “laziest coon I evah seen in mah whole life”), but his unmarked speech distinguishes him from his African American shipmates. What did it mean for Walrond, a West Indian immigrant, to write vernacular for his African American character and standard English for his Caribbean character? As an author, this was a cross-cultural, intraracial masquerade. Caricaturing African American speech, it illustrates Walrond’s experimentation with polyphony and masking, a process Chude-Sokei has called “learning to both be and play an African American.”34 Employing the time-honored American trope of the “happy darky,” the story exhibits a supposed authenticity of character. But its artifice is revealed in the very different speech of Salambo, a Sambo on the lam.
But the story is a trickster tale, and just as Silver King gets the best of Salambo in the end, so Walrond engages in a form of narrative tricksterism, his “disgusting darky story” exhibiting popular stereotypes yet subverting them. It turns out that Silver King is only apparently ridiculous; he is sophisticated beyond his modest station. When Salambo reads samples of the verse he composed on the moonlit deck, Silver King calls it mere “mought-water” and lectures him about Paul Laurence Dunbar. In contrast to Salambo’s limpid doggerel, Silver King belts out Delta blues in a “golden basso profundissimo.” Just as Silver King generates certain expectations only to subvert them, Walrond deploys then deforms the minstrel mask, subverting the expectations generated by Silver King’s ostentation and palavering.
If there is more at work formally in “The Silver King” than appears at first glance, it makes no literary pretensions and is really just a lark. Although literariness was not necessarily prized in pulp fiction, these stories are significant for their polyphony and their colonial sensibility. These elements distinguished them from most everything being written at the time. The implicit question Walrond asked was: How could cross-cultural, transnational knowledge be represented in literature? The dominant models were Anglo-American travel and romance narratives. He knew their conventions well, but he was aware of their limitations and distortions. In 1924, he assessed the tradition against which he would define his own practice: “Usually a Melville or a Stevenson can get into a portrait of the tropics an idea of the beauty of nature—the emerald sea, the golden sands, the pearly lakes and teeming forests. It is when they come to the problem of delving into the complex nature of the natives that most of our writers […] slip and make asses of themselves” (“Our” 219). Nowhere was Walrond’s break from the Anglo-American tradition more pronounced than in his depiction of Panama. North American readers were familiar with the region because the canal was such a productive site of American national sentiment, generating a certain kind of knowledge. Articles, books, and photo essays issued forth, a mythology of U.S. technology, ingenuity, and determination. However, just as Caribbean labor was all but excised from this narrative, so too was the impact of the occupation and the complexity of the resulting society. Despite their eccentricities, Walrond’s pulp stories examined the region’s cultural hybridity, its legacy of creolization, and its challenge to Anglo-American powers of discernment.
There is not one Panama story, for example, in which Walrond fails to address the Canal Zone’s racial segregation, which effectively sorted residents by wealth and privilege. White Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) employees lived in Cristóbal, across the bay from the Caribbean workers and families in Colón, cheek by jowl alongside Panamanians, Asians, and others drawn to the region. A frontier sensibility and an entrepreneurial culture suffused the area, compelling interaction across language, ethnicity, class, and nation. The failure of Anglo-Americans to conceive Caribbean complexities also registers at the level of plot and character. Whites do not come in for satirical or overtly critical treatment, but they embody a peculiar paradox: possessed of extraordinary power and privilege in the Canal Zone, they are blissfully ignorant of and vulnerable to the knowledge and modes of expression of the nonwhite residents. The nonwhite Panamanians in these stories share a counterknowledge set at a subversive angle to North American mythology. As in the trickster tradition, official power and privilege are always susceptible to reversal.
Walrond pursued an equivocal project in these Caribbean stories, invoking Conradian tropes of civilization fraying at the edges into barbarism, yet insisting on an intricacy and counterknowledge inherent in coloniality. Anxious not to “pollute” art with propaganda, he had been pursuing separate projects in his journalism and fiction. Clever and vibrant, the Caribbean stories were innovative without being poignant, saleable but flawed. His investigative reports on migrations demonstrated his grasp of their implications but did not stray from empiricism and reasoned argument. To reach the achievement Tropic Death represented, he needed to hone his craft but also to blur the line between art and politics. A fiction equal to the transformations he witnessed would not stop at dialect, folktale, and tropical sunsets; it would incorporate his recognition that the Afro-Caribbean diaspora was nothing less than a decisive convulsion of modernity. Had he followed established paths, he would have continued writing lively but disposable sketches and perhaps advanced as a journalist. That he did not is a testament to his self-willed transformation as a writer and to the influence of Opportunity’s quietly ambitious editor.
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
Opportunity was arguably the single most important periodical to the New Negro literary movement. Others had higher circulations and featured writers and artists prominently, but they were drawn into the arts in part by the initiative and success of Opportunity, founded in January 1923.35 As a forum for the finest talent of the era, Opportunity was exceptional; few New Negro writers published there first, but none escaped its notice. Hughes and Hurston credited editor Charles Johnson with launching their careers. He “did more to encourage and develop Negro writers during the 1920s than anyone else in America,” Hughes wrote.36 Hurston said she “came to New York through Opportunity, and through Opportunity to Barnard,” calling Johnson the “root” of the movement.37 When Walrond became business manager in 1925, he had been publishing there since its inception.
The defining document of the Harlem Renaissance is widely held to be The New Negro, conceived at the downtown Civic Club in March 1924, where a group known as the Writers Guild was introduced to New York’s publishing establishment. Locke and Du Bois are credited with orchestrating the Harlem Renaissance, but the impact of Charles Johnson, a sociologist trained at the University of Chicago and recruited to the New York headquarters of the Urban League, was equally decisive. For someone so prolific, “written evidence of his vast influence on the Harlem of the New Negro is curiously spotty,” notes David Levering Lewis. “It seems to have been his nature to work behind the scenes, recruiting and guiding others into the spotlight.”38 Johnson’s self-effacement belied his true impact. Attending to Walrond’s career not only reveals a hidden transcript of Johnson’s activity, it suggests that Walrond himself provided more impetus than is generally thought.
In summer 1923, Walrond and Countée Cullen were estranged and managing vexatious personal and professional problems. Both struggled in their intimate relationships—Walrond looking to exit a marriage, Cullen looking to get into one. Walrond’s relationship with Edith was further strained when they conceived a third child in August 1923. That fall, his family left for Kingston without him. Cullen was engaged in some soul-searching of his own, convincing himself that the right woman could cure him of homosexuality. He wrote frequently of this “problem” to Locke, whose homosexuality was an open secret. However, soon the reticent preacher’s son was cavorting with Yolande Du Bois, whom he recently met. He was smitten, as he told Locke: “I believe I am near the solution of my problem. But I shall proceed warily.”39 Cullen’s cryptic phrasing is illuminated by his other correspondence, which expressed alternately and with equal desperation his need to overcome his homosexuality and his need to find a discreet, compatible male partner. Locke disapproved of the relationship with Yolande as “a solution.” “I can forgive you for refusing my advice,” he fulminated, “but I cannot forgive you for transgressing a law of your own nature—because nature herself will not forgive you.”40
4.3 Photograph of Countée Cullen, 1932, photographer unknown.
Courtesy of the New York Daily News.
Just as Walrond and Cullen both struggled with their personal lives, they imposed similarly stringent demands upon their artistic development. Each sought to reconcile a desire to transcend sentiment and propaganda in art with a desire to address urgent issues of race. Walrond inveighed against efforts to disguise sociological narratives as good fiction, and Cullen, an admirer of Keats and Millay, took the occasion of receiving the Witter Bynner undergraduate poetry prize to lament the traces of race consciousness in his poetry.41 Walrond began talking seriously with friends in late 1923 about bold collective steps to publicize their work, and Cullen was among the first he approached. Walrond wrote breezily from Atlanta, where The International Interpreter sent him on assignment. Enjoying his most prolific period to date—eight publications in one four-month stretch—his Caribbean stories were placed, and Success declared him in a bit of puffery a “new, young master of vivid narrative” with “the making of one the greatest novelists and short story writers of our day” (32). Walrond was thrilled about his role in Harlem’s artistic ferment but self-conscious that his talent was surpassed by peers such as Cullen.
My dear Countée: Well, old fellow, it is Saturday night and I thought I’d drop you a line. I arrived here Monday, after a terrifying experience (which is not going to be without its literary effects, no matter how feeble) on the Jim Crow Car from Washington. I really cannot understand how folks travel that way year in and year out. I can’t.
I read Lucien White’s write up of you in the “Age.” It was fine. That is the sort of recognition that is going to help us put our ideas over. I think if everything goes well we ought to be thinking keenly on that score very soon. What with my success as a hack writer and your growing popularity as a poet of the first rank we ought to be able to do most anything, from seducing Sadie Peterson to conquering Joe Gould’s prejudices against the bath tub. […]
I ought to tell you something of the life and my work and experiences here. Atlanta, Countée, is alright for anybody who wants to be a Babbitt, but for a poet or one who is sensitive to the finer things in life it is a pig sty.
Of course I am on a Babbitt-wooing mission, and in that capacity I stand ready willing and able to the gums to resist the emoluments of any of you poets and liberals and neo-liberals and backwoods yankees and nigger upstarts and […] fundamentalists and apostles of culture and idealism and beauty and all such rot.42
Despite the wry self-deprecation, Walrond’s ambition is clear; he felt the time was right to “put our ideas over” and enlisted Cullen’s help in “thinking keenly on that score.” The “Babbitt-wooing mission” was a campaign to publicize the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, a federal initiative, but as his ironic closing suggests, he preferred poets, apostles of culture, and others “sensitive to the finer things in life” to the businessmen he was sent to meet.
Walrond’s eagerness to take bolder steps found a sympathetic ear with Charles Johnson. Trained by the eminent sociologist Robert Park, Johnson’s analysis of the 1919 race riots led to a directorship of the Urban League’s Division of Research and Investigations. His empiricism was tempered by a faith in the arts as transformative of public opinion and a conviction that “black artists should be free, not merely to express anything they feel, but to feel the pulsations and rhythms of their own life.” Some have cast Johnson as a cunning opportunist, exploiting the “Negro vogue,” but this neglects his commitment to publicizing and theorizing the arts.43 As George Hutchinson has shown, his intellectual orientation was shaped by pragmatist philosophy, in which cultural self-expression was as highly prized as dispassionate analysis (176).44 He saw the present group of writers as “the legitimate successors of the voices that first sang the Spirituals.” The audacity of his vision is difficult to grasp in retrospect, but for its time Johnson’s approach to the arts as at once beautiful and useful to the cause of interracial understanding was exceptional.
By February 1924, the group had hatched a plan and Johnson resolved to recruit Locke. He wrote about a “matter which is being planned by Walrond, Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, myself and some others, which hopes to interest and include you.”
I may have spoken to you about a little group which meets here, with some degree of regularity, to talk informally about “books and things.” Most of the persons interested you know: Walrond, Cullen, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Jessie Fauset, Eloise Bibb Thompson, Regina Anderson, Harold Jackman, and myself. There have been some very interesting sessions and at the last one it was proposed that something be done to mark the growing self-consciousness of this newer school of writers and as a desirable time the date of the appearance of Jessie Fauset’s book was selected, that is, around the twentieth of March. The idea has grown somewhat and it is the present purpose to include as many of the new school of writers as possible. […] But our plans for you were a bit more complicated. We want you to take a certain role in the movement. We are working up a dinner meeting, probably at the Civic Club, to which about fifty persons will be invited. […] You were thought of as a sort of Master of Ceremonies for the “movement.”45
4.4 Photograph of Charles S. Johnson, 1948, by Carl Van Vechten.
James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of the Van Vechten Trust.
Like Walrond and Johnson, Locke saw this generation’s work as a threshold. “We have enough talent now to begin to have a movement—and express a school of thought,” he wrote Hughes.46
Fauset had gone to great lengths to solicit contributions to The Crisis and to cultivate an audience for creative writing, setting to work in 1922 on a novel of her own. At the same time, Toomer gathered his writings into a manuscript, and the resulting books, There Is Confusion and Cane, were published by Boni & Liveright within seven months of each other. Walter White signed with Knopf for Fire in the Flint, and work by African Americans appeared in “little magazines” and mainstream venues alike. But the cultural terrain truly shifted with a classical music performance, the American debut of Roland Hayes, an African American tenor who had electrified European audiences. First appearing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, then at New York’s Town Hall, “Hayes promptly became a national symbol, if not a legend,” recalled Arna Bontemps, “the first of his color to invade the closed precincts of top-level concert music in this nation.” And “Charles Johnson did not fail to put it all in context.”47 It was a propitious time, Johnson realized, to stage a publicity stunt. Walrond and the others meeting at Regina Anderson’s apartment found an enthusiastic champion in the staid sociologist.
Johnson’s position and tact helped him pull off something unprecedented in African American letters. By enlisting the help of Locke and Fauset, yet keeping Fauset’s boss and the folks at The Messenger out of the planning, he and the Writers Guild recruited an extraordinary range of white publishers and editors for the Civic Club event, a dinner that featured presentations from Locke, Van Doren, and Liveright and readings by Cullen and Bennett, among others.48 Johnson benefited from Walrond’s assistance because he “made his own contacts” and “would go out and seek editors and publishers […] rather than rely on friends or agents or other people.”49 Their plan was not self-evidently promising, and some thought it inadvisable. Was it not the height of folly, while lynching and intimidation prevailed in the South and discrimination was rampant in public life in the North, to neglect questions of power and politics and expect literature to advance material progress? But Johnson was a shrewd promoter, articulating his convictions about the arts in advance of the event: “There has been manifest recently a most amazing change in the public mind on the question of the Negro,” he editorialized. “There is a healthy hunger for more information—a demand for a new interpretation of characters long and admittedly misunderstood.” Although “formal inter-racial bodies” deserved some credit for effecting this change, Johnson held “the new group of young Negro writers” primarily responsible.
[They] have dragged themselves out of the deadening slough of the race’s historical inferiority complex, and with an unconquerable audacity are beginning to make this group interesting. They are leaving to the old school its labored lamentations and protests, read only by those who agree with them, and are writing about life. And it may be said to the credit of literary America that where these bold strokes emancipate their message from the miasma of race they are being accepted as literature.50
His examples were Toomer, “author of the exotic ‘Cane,’” and Walrond, whose “quite unqualified appraisal” by Success he cited.
The guest list was long and luminous, including Eugene O’Neill, H. L. Mencken, Oswald Garrison Villard, Zona Gale, Ridgely Torrence, “and about twenty more of this type,” Johnson’s invitation said. “This type” included Arthur Spingarn of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) founder Roger Baldwin; art collector and philanthropist Albert Barnes; philosopher John Dewey; editors from The Nation, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and Survey; columnists Heywood Broun and Konrad Bercovici; and novelists Rebecca West, Gertrude Sanborn, and T. S. Stribling. Among the celebrated African Americans were Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, J. A. Rogers, and Montgomery Gregory, along with the Writers Guild members: Walrond, Cullen, Anderson, Hughes, Fauset, Bennett, Jackman, and Eloise Bibb Thompson. As he opened the responses, Johnson realized the scale of the thing. “No accidents can afford to happen now,” he told Locke, “The idea has gone ‘big.’”51
By any measure, the event was a huge success. That Friday evening in March, the Greenwich Village venue was abuzz with more than one hundred revelers. Opportunity claimed, “There was no formal, prearranged program,” just “a surprising spontaneity of expression both from the members of the writers’ group and the distinguished visitors.”52 But in fact, Charles Johnson, ever the impresario, carefully orchestrated the proceedings, directing Locke to meet him that morning to review plans. Several speakers prepared remarks, Cullen and Bennett were asked to read a poem each, and Van Doren and Barnes were asked to deliver keynote addresses. Thus, if anyone exhibited “spontaneity of expression” it was probably only Liveright, who was notorious for relying principally on liquid courage. No record survives of Walrond’s response, but one can imagine the satisfaction he felt. “Our little group,” as Nance called it, had engineered a stunning publicity coup. After Charles Johnson welcomed the guests, offering “a brief interpretation of the object of the Writers Guild,” Locke, Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson delivered speeches, striking a common theme: the younger writers’ refusal to indulge in apologies or “inferiority complexes.” This was also, Liveright said, the chief virtue of Cane, whose merits he affirmed despite poor sales. For Walrond, it must have been gratifying to hear Liveright challenge the audience to “test the waters of black talent with a few publishing contracts,” and exhilarating to hear poems from his friends Cullen and Bennett, who concluded the evening with “To Usward,” likening the new generation to ginger jars gathering dust on a shelf, “sealed/ By nature’s heritage.” They were ready, Bennett declared, “to break the seal of years/ With pungent thrusts of song.”53
“A big plug was bitten off,” Johnson declared, “Now it’s a question of living up to the reputation.”54 Walrond’s behind-the-scenes effort ensured that the event yielded results. “When the dinner ended, Paul Kellogg, editor of the Survey Graphic, stayed on to talk to Countée Cullen, Eric Walrond, Jessie Fauset, and the others and then approached Charles Johnson with an unprecedented offer. He wanted to ‘devote an entire issue to the similar subjects as treated by the representatives of the group.’”55 This would be the Survey issue “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” which was guest-edited by Locke and sold 42,000 copies, double the usual. In turn, the Survey issue became The New Negro, published in 1925. As important as Kellogg’s opening gambit, Du Bois announced a Crisis literary contest, as did Johnson later that year for Opportunity, and he and Liveright mobilized their publicity apparatus. Boni & Liveright advertised in the New York Times Book Review, announcing Fauset’s novel and trumpeting the event at which “the intellectual leaders of the metropolis celebrated the birth of a new sort of book about colored people.”56 Walrond was tasked with writing up the event for the New York World and sought Locke’s assistance gathering transcripts of the speakers’ remarks.57 News of the event spread, and Johnson reported that “a stream of manuscripts has started into my office.” It is no exaggeration to say that after March 1924, African American literature would never be the same.
The most tangible benefit for Walrond was the appearance in The New Negro of his story “The Palm Porch,” a lurid tale set in a Panama brothel. The story’s inclusion returns us to a recurring tension in Walrond’s career, for although he enjoyed the fruits of his labor with the Writer’s Guild, it came at a cost. The movement defined itself as an American phenomenon despite the contrapuntal accents of Caribbean immigrants. One in five black Harlemites was foreign-born by the late 1920s, but the movement bearing its name was framed in national terms, with the New Negro representing at once the inheritance and the proleptic overcoming of a spiritual legacy begun with the sorrow songs, sermons, and blues rhythms of the southern black belt. However, recent scholars remind us “just how seminal was the West Indian presence in the Harlem of the 1920s.”58
To some extent Locke, Du Bois, and Johnson were responsible for the nationalist contours of the movement. Their interests, although not unified, determined much of what was published and how it circulated. Du Bois and Locke were interested in the broader diaspora, but Johnson cut his professional teeth on the social problems of the Great Migration, and the consensus among interested whites was that “Negro” voices were a vital contribution to the chorus of American literature. To the extent that African American writers succeeded at chipping away at publishers’ prejudices, they did so because of the era’s push toward pluralism, a belief that American literature could only become American by emphasizing what made the United States distinctive, drawing on multiple ethnic traditions. Versions of this claim appeared regularly in the progressive journals. Van Doren’s remarks at the Civic Club expressed his “genuine faith in the future of imaginative writing among Negroes in the United States,” a “feeling” that they were “in a remarkably strategic position with reference to the new literary age.” His endorsement was representative of the effort to define New Negro literature as a tributary to the widening stream of American modernism. “What American literature decidedly needs at the moment is color, music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods. If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are.” He invoked novelty of expression and contrasted the “fresh and fierce sense of reality” issuing from African American pens with the “bland optimism of the majority.” Finally, he delineated the territory on which African American writers would base their “vision of human life”: “this continent.” When we understand the Harlem Renaissance as a pivotal era for African American literature we should also understand how American its framing was.59
How, then, did foreignness figure? One might note the prominence accorded Schomburg, McKay, Walrond, W. A. Domingo, and J. A. Rogers in The New Negro and conclude that this was a big tent, including non-Americans (at least males) and fostering intraracial understanding. However, differences of ethnicity, language, and nation were often elided in discussions of the movement, as bichromatic U.S. race relations assumed priority. On or about March 1924, as Walrond heard Carl Van Doren incorporate him into the grand unfolding of a distinctive American tradition, there were at least two reasons he and other West Indians were making tacit peace with their internal marginalization: the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act and the campaign against Garvey. As Locke departed Washington to join Johnson in planning the Civic Club event, Congress was crafting the most restrictive immigration legislation of the century, the Johnson-Reed Act. The immediate effect was to cut the number of immigrants arriving each year almost in half, with the heaviest contraction upon southern and eastern Europe. Immigration from the Caribbean was sharply curtailed, and nativism infused urban communities where Afro-Caribbeans lived in large numbers. Garvey was a lightning rod, his ethnicity and alien status regularly impugned. The “foreigner” angle gained virulence, and the terms “West Indian” and “ignorant” were frequently joined in close syntactic proximity. The Messenger conceded the existence of many “splendid,” “intelligent” Caribbean people but urged ministers, editors, and lecturers to “gird up their courage … and drive the menace of Garveyism out of this country.”60 This was opportunism, but it would not have been possible absent the nativism that delivered the Johnson-Reed Act.
Walrond was not immune to these pressures, and he sought to rescue West Indians from the nativist assault. Paradoxically, he did so through classic American values such as industry and thrift and through a ritualistic disavowal of Garvey. At the height of the “Garvey Must Go” campaign in 1923, he published two articles attacking the presumption “that Garvey, crude, blatant, egocentric, a mental Lilliputian, is the typical West Indian intellectual,” claiming instead that “Garvey by virtue of his upbringing, training, and early environment, is not representative of the best the West Indian Negroes have to offer.” Walrond called West Indians “the Hebrews of the black race,” a model minority for whom “America is the fulfillment of a golden dream” (“Hebrews” 468). To understand the West Indians’ promise, he pointed to other parts of the Americas, where they had been welcomed from Cuba to Panama to the banana fields of Guatemala and Honduras (“West Indian Labor” 240).
At this point, Walrond added a breathtaking bit of sophistry. “Endowed with the spirit of conquest of the Puritan settlers of the isles of the Caribbean, he goes to the ends of the earth, building, erecting, assimilating.” U.S. readers were to understand, in other words, that despite being black and foreign, perhaps West Indian Negroes most resembled Anglo-Americans, sharing a common Puritanism, an ethic of industry and “spirit of conquest” that took them around the world. If this were not enough to establish the affinity, Walrond distinguished West Indians from other Caribbean peoples on the basis of their Englishness. The “Negroes from Guadeloupe and Martinique” the French hired in Panama, “were not of the sturdy pioneering stock who were willing to weather the storms of malaria and disease and dig the ditch. […] The West Indians stuck to their guns, steeled their jaws, and fought the good fight” (241). It is a measure of the xenophobia of the times that Walrond, who was well aware of the imperialist dimensions of the U.S. role in Panama and its exploitation of black labor, would resort to this effort to establish the West Indian’s “sturdy pioneering stock.”
Under Locke’s direction, The New Negro included five foreign-born writers, but the book exudes cultural nationalism. Only Walrond and Domingo addressed non-U.S. subjects in a sustained fashion, and Domingo’s essay “The Gift of the Tropics” is fundamentally about black New York, despite encouraging sensitivity toward ethnic differences. For J. A. Rogers in “Jazz at Home,” home is emphatically the United States though he grew up in Jamaica, and his aim is to trace the cabarets and juke joints back to the Mississippi Delta. McKay could be said to challenge the national frame, but of his six poems only “The Tropics in New York” implies his foreignness, and no poem in The New Negro could be more classically American than his “White Houses.” Schomburg nowhere betrays his ethnic difference, and although his essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past” takes readers far beyond the borders of the United States, it is finally the American Negro whose past Schomburg aims to dig up. To hear the transnational strains of The New Negro, one must read against its American grain. Locke set it at the outset in his extraordinary introduction, where he argues that “in the process of being transplanted the Negro is being transformed, […] the migrant masses shifting from countryside to city, hurdl[ing] several generations of experience at a leap.” He nodded to a racial cosmopolitanism, but his American exceptionalism was emphatic: African Americans were “the advance-guard” of the diaspora, and here, “The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas.”61
How incongruous Walrond’s “The Palm Porch” seems in this context. It appears in a section of fiction following two texts with “America” in their titles. It shares space with stories by Rudolph Fisher, whose protagonist is a North Carolina transplant; John Matheus, whose setting is West Virginia; Toomer, whose “Fern” and “Carma” take place on Georgia’s “Dixie Pike”; Bruce Nugent, whose “Sahdji” is ostensibly an African princess but is really an American projection of Africa; and Hurston, whose “Spunk” takes place in a Florida village where men wear “big black Stetson” hats and women drink “sasp’rilluh.” Walrond’s setting diverges sharply, as does his entire frame of reference. The migration behind Walrond’s story is the West Indian’s to Panama, not the African American’s north.
East of the Palm Porch roared the city of Colon. Hudson Alley, “G” Street … coolies, natives, Island blacks swarming to the Canal. All about, nothing but tenements … city word for cabins … low, soggy, toppling. Near the sky rose the Ant’s Nest. Six stories high and it took up half a city block. One rickety staircase … in the rear. No two of its rooms connected. Each sheltered a family of eight or nine. A balcony ringed each floor. […] Sorry lot. Tugging at the apron strings of life, scabrous, sore-footed natives, spouting saliva into unisolated cisterns. Naked on the floors of Chinese rum shops and chow-stands. Nigger-loving Chinks unmoved and unafraid of the consequences of a breed of untarnished … seemingly … Asiatics growing up around the breasts of West Indian maidens. Pious English peasant blacks … perforating the picture … going to church, to lodge meetings, to hear fiery orations. (116–17)
“The Palm Porch” is shot through with intraracial and interracial dynamics that exceed the bichromatic North American frame: “Chinks” loving “Niggers,” Panamanians living with “Coolies,” Caribbean laborers and respectable church-going peasants, an English ship’s captain at the brothel. Perhaps in its superficial resemblance to Harlem, this Colón did not strike The New Negro readers as foreign. Perhaps the stylized prose affiliated it with experimental New Negro writers such as Toomer. Perhaps its folk speech allied it with Hurston, Hughes, and others who employed African American vernacular.
But to domesticate “The Palm Porch” in this way, to round off its strange corners, involves no small degree of misrecognition and muting. Louis Chude-Sokei has said of Bert Williams, “His was a heteroglossia cursed to be continually recuperated by the ‘centripetal’ forces of America’s racial polarities, which either sifted out the accents of Caribbean crossings or employed them as signifiers of an ‘elsewhere’ marginal to a primary discursive formation.”62 It would overstate the matter to call Walrond’s heteroglossia cursed to the point of continual recuperation, but the accents of his Caribbean crossings are only audible if we suspend the axiomatic nationalism of the New Negro movement. What if we suppose instead, as Walrond did, that Afro-Caribbean speech, location, and experience were, like their African American counterparts, constitutive of a black Atlantic formation?
Miss Buckner, the protagonist of “The Palm Porch,” is Jamaican by birth, descended from “a union of white and Negro, French or Spanish, English or Maroon … no one knew. And her daughters, sculptural marvels of gold and yellow, were enshrined in a similar mystery (119). Opening her mouth, she might utter the King’s English, as in, “O! Captain, in dear old Kingston, none of this sort of thing ever occurred … None! And of course it constrains me profusely!” (124). But it might be salty patois: “It a dam’ pity shame,” she indicts her daughter’s relations with a “shiny-armed black” man, “It a dam’ pity shame.” When another daughter takes up with a mulatto man, she disapproves in heavily marked vernacular. “Oh, Gahd,” she cries, “To tink dat a handsome gal like dat would-ah tek up with a dam’ black neygah man like him, he? Now, wa’ you tink o’ dat? H’answer me, no!” (120) Miss Buckner’s voice is distinct from the southern U.S. dialects, such as Fisher’s Carolinians, Matheus’s West Virginians, and Hurston’s Floridians, who say things like, “He ain’t skeered of nothin’ on God’s green footstool—nothin’! He rides that log down at the sawmill jus’ like he struts ‘round wid another man’s wife” (105). Nevertheless, the orthographic marks and the characters’ blackness conspired to obscure the specificity of Walrond’s effort.
DEAR LOCKUS AND ALL THE WITCHES IN CREATION
Walrond should have been elated; the movement was anointed with full-throated praise. The Opportunity and Crisis awards were generously funded, and a sense of finally having arrived possessed Harlem writers. He sat for the artist Winold Reiss, whose portraits adorned the special issue of Survey. Reiss drew Walrond in the style of the others—rich color, texture, and detail for the face and head atop the sparest outline of shirt and coat—but the others appear at an angle or with eyes averted, while Walrond’s portrait stares directly at viewers, fixing us in his gaze. His shoulders squared, jaw set, he appears poised, calm, and confident, every bit as “smooth as long staple cotton,” as David Levering Lewis describes him.63 Inside, however, he was struggling mightily, his profound unease belying the portrait’s placid demeanor.
4.5 Portrait of Eric Walrond by Winold Reiss, c. 1925, pastel on board.
Courtesy of Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee.
Signs of depression emerged in his letters to Locke, whom he addressed with casual familiarity, calling him “my dear Lockus.” The correspondence also reveals an imbalance of power and an anxiety on Walrond’s part to impress the exacting professor. A month after the Civic Club event he wrote,
I hope you do not consider the time we spent together Saturday wasted. […] When I started this letter I wanted to say something about my seeming inability to do justice to you whenever I am with you, but for some reason I can not get my thoughts together this morning to really put them down as I would like to. Some time, say when I take advantage of your kind invitation and come to Washington, I shall try and get it all out. In the meantime, I shall run along—chased by all the witches in creation as to the utter inadequacy of this note.64
These were the first of many self-deprecations and apologies. Walrond was not alone in feeling daunted by the austere Locke, whose fastidious refinement made many people insecure. But Walrond was particularly susceptible. He first wrote of depression in May 1924, apologizing for having missed an opportunity to discuss business with Locke, including his work for the Survey. Walrond confessed that he had misplaced a letter of reference Locke had written; “I guess you will say I am ‘fumbling the balls again.’ I am sorry.” Although he was delighted that “Countee and I were initiated into Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity last Saturday night,” the “rollicking affair” did little to lift his spirits. “Things have not been so very well with me and I have been in a pretty melancholy state for the past week. […] I am not doing very much work at present, but I think I am due for a let up. I am in one of my old shifting, restless, nervous moods.” This was clearly not a new condition. He was familiar with its symptoms and rhythms. Perhaps it explains his failure to complete his City College courses that term. A remedy came to mind—“I think what I need is a sea voyage somewhere”—but he promised to visit Locke in Washington soon.65
His depression worsened. Anxious about his place in the Survey, Walrond visited the magazine’s office, inquiring about his contributor’s letter.66 He spent time in New York with Locke, en route to Europe, and they attended a party that ended badly (“I was glad to know that the flat did not burn down,” he wrote.) Walrond’s letter indicates the depth of his anxiety and the intimacy of his relationship with Locke. Although he had been publishing widely, his work on a novel, Tiger Lilly, was frustrating.67 The tone suggests the two may have had an affair, but no evidence exists. Locke’s affairs with other men are a matter of record, and although Walrond is never mentioned, Locke may have counted him among what he called his “spiritual children.”68 Walrond professed anguish that his depression prevented him from traveling to visit Locke.
I have put off writing you until this morning because I had hoped and prayed that my plans would make it possible for me to be with you tomorrow. I find, to my deepest regret, that I will not be able to come down. And here is why. All the winter I have spent in a rather profitless manner—indeed, all I have to show for it is a loosely constructed, badly unadorned novel. And it is on that account I planned to get on my feet again either by going away on a boat or to the mountains where I should have a chance to bolster myself up again and, chiefly, to get away from the sterile environment in Harlem. Then again, as I intimated to you, I must get to Columbia in the Fall, and there is a multitude of little things here that I must get straightened out before I shall be able to do that.
So far I have not been able to get away—and the result is a state of anxiety, melancholy, and depression. In other words, I do not think 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. There is really a self, a side of me, I think, that is not bad, not undesirable, but as fate would have it, this side has been for some time submerged by the harsh rulings of life.
You ask me to write you regarding my plans. I hasten to do so. First, of course, is to get away. 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. Perhaps (I don’t know) conditions out in the country may make it possible for me to go back to it and try to get it into shape. However, since it has got itself out of my system, 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. Again, I find that another story of similar length is popping up—and I am such a furiously emotional creature I wonder if I ought not to get at that, regardless of my hostile mind, and get that off, too. I really believe that in this raw, briny, floundering state I ought to shoot ahead and get the writing over with—and hope for a day of placid distraction when I shall be able to go over every line with the care and concern of a mothering bird. […]
Despite my fears and disillusions I am doing a lot of reading … and I am plumbing the depths of that glowing sahara you pointed out to me the evening we were at Glenn’s.… Believe me, it is with the utmost regret and pain that I cannot be with you tomorrow.
Among the elusive references here, the most enigmatic is his remark about “that glowing sahara.” But his self-image as “a furiously emotional creature” possessed of a “hostile mind” is stark and unambiguous. Characterizing himself as “high-strung, unnatural, morbid, discontented,” he attributes his condition to “the harsh rulings of life,” circumstances that suppress his better “side.”
It was likely this state of mind that led to the most hostile, churlish book review of his career. Reviewing Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion in The New Republic, he panned it, barely touching on the book and disparaging Fauset. Some of her peers found her writing fussy and her characters too proper, but none expressed this view as intemperately as Walrond. The novel, he conceded, was “significant,” but it was “not really ‘younger generation Negro’ stuff.” “Mediocre, a work of puny, painstaking labor, ‘There Is Confusion’ is not meant for people who know anything about the Negro and his problems. It is aimed with unpardonable naiveté at the very young or the pertinently old” (192). It is hard to imagine a more divisive statement, and to what end? Perhaps Walrond sought to impress Locke, who dismissed Fauset’s talent.69 He may have firmly believed what he wrote, that the “esoteric” school was the vanguard, that Fauset, depicting upper-class African Americans, was in the thrall of an “inferiority complex,” anxious to prove “Negro” respectability. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance over his shoulder would have revealed the bridges he was burning.
Recklessly uncharitable, the review upset Fauset’s friends. “Your review of Jessie Fauset’s ‘There Is Confusion’ is really not worthy of the New Republic,” Du Bois wrote, “It is not a review or even a comment, but a quite gratuitous slur upon a work which, whatever its merits, is at least a sincere and unusual product.”70 Jackman and Hughes expressed their outrage to Cullen, but he defended Walrond: “I think you are all too harsh with Eric. Surely a reviewer has a right to his opinion without being dubbed an ass, a numbskull, a jealous prig, and other equally delightful appellations.”71 Hughes was traveling with Locke in Paris, and in an otherwise upbeat letter he expressed his disapproval, calling Walrond’s review “ugly,” “childish,” and “just about as worthless a thing as that publication ever contained. Eric ought to be ashamed of himself.”72
In fact, Walrond was thoroughly ashamed of himself. Not about the review, but constitutionally so. Shame became a nagging burden he sought continually to exorcise. His ambitions, he felt, were always exceeding his abilities. The intended contribution to the Survey, an essay entitled “The Mirrors of Harlem,” left him exasperated, much like his “badly unadorned” novel.
I’m afraid I haven’t been able to execute the assignment to the satisfaction of either you or Mr. Kellogg—but […] after all a thing of this sort, conceived and done by someone with a more or less eccentric way of looking at things, which, to me is the only way it ought to be done—in order to be effective must take a quite independent attitude and avoid all this Christian prattle that has been heaped upon the Negro.73
The note was handwritten, but its contents were formal. Alternately contrite and defiant but terse throughout, it was addressed “Dear Dr. Locke” and signed, “Yours sincerely, Eric D. Walrond.” As late as June 1925 Walrond was still revising “The Mirrors of Harlem,” but the essay never appeared. Locke included “The Palm Porch” in The New Negro but nothing in the Survey.74
Walrond’s insecurities extended to his social milieu. Despite being someone to whom people were drawn “because he was very friendly,” as Nance said, Walrond could agonize over a faux pas and worry himself sick. At a party in 1925 he mistook someone for the wife of Alfred Knopf, an error for which he berated himself in a letter to Carl Van Vechten. Calling himself “a proper, pitiable object for a Freudian psychologist,” Walrond took this trivial breach of etiquette as a referendum on his character.
I am such a terrible searcher after things that are not always clear to me that I myself half of the time do not know what I am going to say or do next. It is a sorry condition to be in, I suppose, but it will probably mean that half of the people whom I care about most in the world will sooner or later pass me up entirely or graciously and charitably let it go at that.… All of which is sometimes quite distressing to me.75
His present instability and despondency were at odds with his reputation as capable and self-assured, “smooth as long-staple cotton.”
THE NIGHT SIDE OF THE SOUL: CABARET WRITING AND THE POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY
Another way to explain the severity of Walrond’s uncharitable review of Fauset’s novel is to see it not as a manifestation of psychological distress but as an exhaustion of patience with uplift ideology. The terms in which he criticized it demonstrate the place the book and its author held in the discourse of respectability informing the New Negro project: It lacked the “beauty and passion” of the “insouciant, strident neophytes.” Although he would soon work for a paragon of uplift, the Urban League, the premise that “the worst elements of the race” required reform on a model of middle-class respectability smacked of elitism and relegated a great deal of expressive black culture to the realm of the shameful, abject, and socially deviant. Walrond was fed up, he said, with “all this Christian prattle.” In the face of the normative ideals coming to characterize the New Negro movement, “a more or less eccentric way of looking at things” was required, and late 1924 and 1925 found Walrond chafing under the strictures of respectability and formulating an “eccentric” perspective. Less a coherent political or aesthetic platform, it was cosmopolitan, queer, and transnational, forged primarily in Harlem’s cabarets and performed in prose. At its center was an affirmation of pleasure—pleasure as a challenge to bourgeois respectability, as an affective index of liberated black writing, and as a remedy for the depression that threatened to undo him.
To be sure, Walrond tried to stay the course of sober self-discipline. He enrolled in Columbia, taking three classes, one of which was taught by the author of a study of the supernatural in modern fiction. Dorothy Scarborough’s enthusiasm for the supernatural as “an ever-present force in literature,” “the night side of the soul that attracts us all,” influenced Tropic Death, which is populated by ghosts, spells, and the return of various forms of the repressed.76 Unlike his previous term at City College, Walrond passed his Columbia courses with flying colors.77 He continued his involvement with West Indian political affairs, publicizing and attending events organized by Casper Holstein and the Virgin Islands Congressional Council.78 And he got his longed-for escape from New York, not with a sea voyage but a trip to Kansas City.
His account of the trip was not published in the Urban League’s journal, which sent him there, but in The Messenger, detailing his effort to interview “the richest colored sister in the world.” It bore no resemblance to traditional journalism, as its title, “Romance of a Reporter,” indicated. The romance refers to his attempts—thwarted, then fulfilled—to meet the reclusive “millionairess” and to discover the source of her wealth. Departing flagrantly from reporting, Walrond cast himself as an intrepid gallant who cracks the social codes of the black upper crust. “Mrs. Rector Campbell, the richest colored girl in the world, whom the black folks in Kansas City refer to as a ‘snitcher,’ hates school, hates books, hates to be ‘colored,’ hates above all to be ‘written up’” (382). Walrond boasted of his success at getting a tough interview where others had failed, including local editors and even Du Bois. He adapted the percussive prose of boudoir melodrama to “Negro” society, recounting having “bowed very prettily before” Mrs. Campbell, “a silent, black, apple faced girl, reclining Cleopatraly on a rich leopard-spotted couch” (382).
More than “Romance of a Reporter,” two essays he published that winter in mainstream journals announced him as an authoritative critic, someone to whom African Americans looked to represent them and to whom whites looked for insight into black culture. Both journals gave him more space than he was accustomed to, and Walrond developed his observations with detail and vigor. “Imperator Africanus,” an analysis of the Garvey movement, appeared in The Independent. Although it cast Garvey as a “roof-raising propagandist” who created “a fairy dream world” with “all the technique of delusion,” he was not a cartoonish villain (123).79 He moved people as Du Bois never could, Walrond maintained, because although Du Bois was “undoubtedly the most brilliant Negro in the United States,” he was “proud, haughty, [and] an incurable snob” (126). Walrond offered a transnational account of the first stirrings of the New Negro movement:
Fresh from the war, from the bloodstained fields of France and Mesopotamia, the black troops, bitter, broken, disillusioned, stormed the gates of the whites—pleaded for a share of that liberty and democracy which they were led to believe were the things for which they had fought. […] It was the first mass contact of the negro from the Old and the New Worlds. Here something which the white warlords had not bargained on resulted. The negroes met and exchanged and compounded their views on the whites, their civilization, and their masters. Here the policies of France and Britain and Belgium and the United States with regard to their black wards were put in the scales. And when the blacks rose from the resulting pyre of disillusionment a new light shone in their eyes—a new spirit, a burning ideal, to be men, to fight and conquer and actually wrest their heritage, their destiny from those who controlled it. (121–22)
Historians trace the New Negro movement to the return of black soldiers from World War I, but the frame is seldom extended, as here, to the experience of people of African descent outside the United States and the political analysis they advanced, putting Western nations “in the scales.” The war served in Walrond’s view to throw the engine of diaspora into reverse, figuring not a sentimental return to the motherland but the recognition of common interests across new borders.
A similar emphasis on the diversity of black experience characterized “The Negro Literati,” an essay that winter in Brentano’s Book Chat. Walrond addressed his predominantly white audience with a challenge to bichromatic ways of seeing.
Haven’t you ever been to Harlem, New York’s black ghetto, on a Sunday afternoon and seen the gay throngs of folk parading along Seventh Avenue? There is nothing like it—this amazing metamorphosis … All the colors of the rainbow do not suffice to do them justice. It is like a human mardi gras: Yellow and gold and brown—of Latin and Dutch origin—Indians, creoles, jet blacks … What a heterogeneous people! And there is something about the life the Negro lives not only in the United States but everywhere that is immensely enthralling. […] He traverses the seven seas. He is everything from captain to cabin boy. […] He is the roamer, the boulevardier of the universe. (31)
Calling Harlem “a human mardi gras” Walrond underscored the range of color, class, and nationality subsumed by New York’s “black belt.” Calling the Negro “the boulevardier of the universe,” he conferred agency and mobility on people widely supposed to be constrained by circumstance, the products of history rather than its producers.
But the force of “The Negro Literati” is its call for writers to free themselves spiritually. “At present he is free politically and socially, but spiritually he is still enslaved. He is unable to let himself go” (31). Here Walrond launched one of the most remarkable, impassioned series of claims in his entire body of work. In early 1925—before McKay’s Home to Harlem, Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and Nigger Heaven, before The New Negro itself—Walrond challenged the respectability brigade, implicating it in the racism its authors sought to contest. What is more, he attributed his perspective to his position as an immigrant.
As a foreigner, I think I can understand the reason for this [spiritual enslavement]. Always conscious of the color problem, the Negro writer in the United States is vigilantly censorious of anything in his work or expression which may put the black race in a disparaging light. Thinking of the prejudiced white who’d take up his book and contemptuously review it, he writes with that preconceived bias in mind. And of course when he begins to write about his own people he lies miserably. He doesn’t paint pictures of people—of tantalizing black people—he knows. No. He dishes up yarns about aristocratic blacks who go to Harvard. He goes down to Wall Street and hires a skyscraper and puts a Negro bank president in it. He goes up to the Adirondacks and buys an estate and puts a black seamstress upon it. He then takes a trip back south. There he takes malicious delight in poking hot irons in the ribs of the “po’ white trash.” Every white man his hero meets is a “nigger hater.” Every yellow girl is a virgin who’s got a devil of a time fighting off the white, lustful pack. And if the story doesn’t wind up with a lynching or a race riot it is bound to do so with bloodhounds on the scent of the daring black who’d had the guts to go get a gun and shoot up that horrid “cracker” town … On occasion these Negro tales deal with what is known about town as “high society.” And by God if there is a society that is more stilted, more snobbish, that is harder to break into, than the Negro society these tales depict, then I’ve yet to hear about it. (32–33)
Among those to whom Walrond looked to refute the emerging orthodoxy, “this negative manner of looking at life,” was Hughes, whose manifesto on “The Negro Artist” appeared the following year. American literature would soon be transformed “by the exploits of these gallant youngsters,” Walrond predicted, and “that time is not very far off.”
These swashbuckling neophytes are not going in for Charity or Uplift work. They don’t give two hurrahs in hell for the sort of writing that attempts to put the Negro on a lofty pedestal. In fact they don’t think of the Negro as a distinct racial type at all. They only write about him because they know more about him than anyone else. He is closer to them. His is part of them. As such they see him. (33)
Walrond cast writing about “respectable” African Americans as willful distortion—public relations without artistry—and writing about the “masses” as realistic and morally courageous. The champions of respectability included elders such as Benjamin Brawley and Allison Davis, who in 1928 rebuked writers who “for nearly ten years […] have been ‘confessing’ the distinctive sordidness and triviality of Negro life, and making an exhibition of their own unhealthy imagination, in the name of frankness and sincerity.”80 Even some of Walrond’s friends advocated respectability. Cullen put it starkly in 1928: “Whether they relish the situation or not, Negroes should be concerned with making good impressions.” He frankly admitted the dissembling it required. “Decency demands that some things be kept secret. […] Let[ing] art portray things as they are, no matter who is hurt, is a blind bit of philosophy.”81
Cullen was more accustomed than most to such compartmentalizing because of his homosexuality, and he was familiar with the cognitive dissonance it occasioned. He confided his desires to Locke, lamenting the difficulty of finding a suitable partner. This was not, he felt, fit for public disclosure. In this context, Walrond’s fleeting pursuit of a romance with Cullen appears somewhat incongruously. Most of Walrond’s romantic relationships were with women, and his relationship with Cullen seems otherwise platonic. But as Henry Louis Gates observed, the Harlem Renaissance was “surely as gay as it was black, not that it was exclusively either of these.”82 Hughes, McKay, Locke, Nugent, Thurman, and other prominent writers had same-sex relationships, some more public than others, despite also having female partners, and scholars have addressed same-sex relationships among New Negro women.83 Sexual practices in 1920s Harlem defy our contemporary straight/gay binary.84 Expressions of love and affection among Harlem Renaissance figures, whatever their sexual preferences, resist our present taxonomies, and we cannot assume that the absence of definitive evidence of homosexuality means that Walrond or his peers were strictly heterosexual. Nor, conversely, can we treat references to homosexual activity or desire as proof of gay “identity” in today’s sense. The events of September 1924, when Cullen said Walrond made sexual advances, are instructively indeterminate.85
Just as Walrond took Locke into his confidence, so Cullen confided in him a torpor into which he had sunk, an expression of unfulfilled desire. “[M]y days are alike and my need deepens,” he wrote, using coded terms for his wish for “an adjustment” to avoid mentioning homosexuality. Cullen wrote to Jackman proposing they borrow his father’s car for a weekend trip with Walrond.86 Upon returning, Cullen wrote Locke, “The trip was a revelation as far as Eric is concerned. He was most surprisingly sympathetic and aggressive, but I am afraid he offers no lasting solution; he is too exacting (I almost said abandoned) and there are some concessions I shall never make.”87 What transpired is uncertain, but it was Cullen’s impression that Walrond made overtures. When Locke responded by suggesting a more “lasting solution,” Llewellyn Ransom, Cullen reiterated his wish for a discreet alternative.
How long will it be before you see L.R. again? If it will be over a week, you might enclose a sealed note to him in your next letter to me, with instructions for him to read and destroy in my presence. Please pardon my urgency, but I must have an adjustment as soon as possible, or I shall be driven to recourse with E.W. and that I fear. You are busy I know, but if you will answer this soon.88
If Cullen’s refusal of Walrond’s apparent advances troubled their relationship, it did not last long. He found in Ransom an appealing partner, and Walrond evidently did not begrudge Cullen that happiness, accompanying him to dinner with Van Vechten soon thereafter.89
Van Vechten’s involvement in the subcultures of Harlem and Greenwich Village is well established, and his journals furnish an important record of Walrond’s participation in what Shane Vogel has called “the scene of Harlem cabaret.” This scene was not only gay-friendly but queer in the sense that its participants forged communities that transgressed the norms of gender, class, race, and sexuality through which respectable culture constituted and disciplined itself. Some of Walrond’s work in 1925 might be dismissed as decadent and sensational. His work for Vanity Fair particularly invites this criticism: “Enter, the New Negro … Exit the Colored Crooner,” “The Adventures of Kit Skyhead and Mistah Beauty,” “Black Bohemia,” and “Charleston, Hey! Hey!” But his accounts of Harlem nightlife and illicit behavior, which depicted spectacular black expressive culture—African Americans performing and enjoying themselves—posed a challenge to the moralistic, class-inflected spirit of reform underpinning the New Negro movement’s progressivism. Walrond and others rejected the “normative racial uplift and sexual respectability that guided the Harlem Renaissance,” turning “instead to the contested space of the cabaret as material to compose alternative narratives of race and sex.”90 Those who repudiated “the values of the black middle class and the patriarchal order of the family in their prose and poetry—not to mention in their personal lives—[were] grouped together disparagingly as the ‘Cabaret School.’”91
Indictments of the Cabaret School for “providing maps to guide pleasure-seeking white slummers on their journeys toward greater exoticism and eroticism” have implicated Walrond.92 Certainly, Harlem fascinated many of his companions but the notion that Walrond was a tour guide for slumming whites, or worse still a sort of pimp, is inaccurate. Though they depicted decadence and dissolution, these writers mobilized a form of class politics that had subsided as the New Negro movement was politely wrested away from leftist radicals by Locke, Du Bois, and other champions of respectability.93 The Cabaret School’s critical impulse is easy to miss because the writing seems to render Harlem a consumable commodity. For Walrond, the cabaret forged “an interclass intimacy between two groups positioned in opposition to each other by uplift sociology: the black working class […] and what Du Bois called the ‘submerged tenth,’ the morally disgraceful fraction of the race.”94 This interclass dynamic was central to Walrond’s writing, especially in connection to Van Vechten. His relationship with Van Vechten is usually couched in terms of patronage: the charismatic “Negro” falling in with the sybaritic white novelist. Elided in this account is the drama of intraracial difference and solidarity that both writers felt was the real story of their time. They shared a desire to redraw the racial lines that proscribed personal affairs, an interest in vernacular expressive forms, and a disdain for sanctimony.
Above all, this meant a shared fascination with Harlem nightlife. By the time they met, Walrond was a regular at the cabarets. These establishments, which mixed music, song, and dance with dining, socializing, and illicit alcohol, gained notoriety with Van Vechten’s 1926 novel Nigger Heaven and the “slumming” trend. Their association with vice and hedonism derived in part from their patrons’ behavior but also from their poverty, for many postwar cabarets bore little resemblance to the Cotton Club or other opulent venues. Writers affirming the pleasures of the cabaret were accused of stereotyping and hastening the demise of an already beleaguered community. Hubert Harrison deplored their confusion of “the language of the gutter” with “the language of the common people,” a practice they acquired, he said, from white bohemians. “Since ‘spice’ rhymes with ‘nice,’ they sometimes think that they are nifty when they are only being nasty […] giving the whole race a bad name.”95 However, what was compelling about the cabaret scene for Walrond and others was precisely the break it signaled from shopworn Negro “types,” expanding the representational palette they inherited.
“Enter, the New Negro, a Distinctive Type Recently Created by the Coloured Cabaret Belt in New York” was a collaboration between the artist Miguel Covarrubias and Walrond, who provided delirious captions for the Mexican prodigy’s stylized drawings.96 It is not hard to imagine why “Enter, the New Negro” might cause offense. Adorned with exaggerated lips, distended smiles, and ostentatious garb, the figures verge on parody, stock types given a Jazz Age makeover. However, for Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair editor, they suggested something new and closer to reality. The subtitle read, “Exit, the Coloured Crooner of Lullabys, the Cotton-Picker, the Mammy-Singer and the Darky Banjo-Player, for so Long Over-Exploited Figures on the American Stage.” Crowninshield explained: “Out of the welter of sentimentality […], the Negro now emerges as an individual, an individual as brisk and actual as your next-door neighbour. He no longer has to be a Pullman-car porter, or over-fond of watermelons, in order to be a successful type on our stage. He is a personality, always, and frequently an artist.” The tension between Crowninshield’s claims and Covarrubias’ drawings raises questions. Are these really individuals or merely types? Have the images, in catching the “exotic spirit of the new Negro,” simply reinscribed the “Negro” as exotic?
Walrond’s text stood uneasily astride this ambivalence. Each caption began with a suggestive title, a Harlem slang phrase. A couple clasping hands at a table is “‘The Last Jump’ Cabaret on a Saturday Night”; two blasé and sartorially resplendent figures, “That Teasin’ Yalla Gal” and “The Sheik of Dahomey,” flank the first page; and a diffident man seated alone is “Kind O’ Melancholy Like.” Walrond’s text underscored an important dimension of “the scene of Harlem cabaret”: the blurred line between performer and spectator. Just as “That Teasin’ Yalla Gal” occupied both positions at different times of night, so this cast of characters failed to distinguish patrons from performers. Not only were one venue’s performers the spectators in another, their physical proximity and modes of mutual address made the boundary porous. As the Covarrubias–Walrond collaboration insisted, the audience was no less spectacular than anyone onstage. Most of the captions are reported speech, marked by nonstandard orthography and gently sending up each character. The “melancholy” loner is “jess natchely a quiet sort of fellow, dat boy is. Bin at dat table all night, sittin’ down, waitin’ for somebody, it seem. Don’t nevah dance or sing or cut up, Nothin’. Jess sits over there, kind o’ melancholy like.” The couple “On a Spree” looks anything but, their languid expressions at odds with their natty dress. The discrepancy prompts Walrond’s streetwise speaker to warn us against judging a Harlem book by its cover, for their reticence belies their talent on the dance floor. “Looks as if dese folks has got the blues, don’t it? Well, that ain’t it, prezactly. Ah wants to tell you that dey’s a gwine ‘out’ to a party, that’s what. That boy swings a mean wheel-barrow; and de gal, she ain’t so bad neither. She sure can shake a wicked soap sud.”
These were the voices, Walrond asserted, of “a distinctive type”: unselfconscious, unflinching, unashamed of their pleasures. Dark skin need not be thin skin, he suggested; a community that acquired the self-assurance to satirize itself had overcome its “inferiority complex.” The Covarrubias–Walrond collaboration was susceptible to being read as a lampoon sketch of the very sort it meant to displace. Compounding this ambivalence, the project hinged on the status of the artists as insiders, its authenticity secured by a tacit understanding that they were “of” the cabaret scene. In a sense they were, but neither was African American, and Covarrubias had just left Mexico the previous year. “Enter, the New Negro” thus involved strategies of mimicry that were obscured by the presumption of intimacy with the community they depicted. Walrond’s fidelity to the sounds of Harlem concealed the extent to which he threw his voice. The conceit persisted in Crowninshield’s preface to Walrond’s next Vanity Fair effort: “This article, on the cabarets of Harlem, is written by a Negro writer, Eric Walrond, who knows the scene he writes of intimately” (“Kit” 52). Like many endorsements whites have furnished to authorize African American writing, this gesture concealed as much as it revealed, certifying Walrond’s authenticity and obscuring his linguistic and ethnic difference, the very difference that would soon be invoked to authenticate Tropic Death.
Extending the Vanity Fair collaboration, Covarrubias illustrated Walrond’s story “The Adventures of Kit Skyhead and Mistah Beauty: An All-Negro Evening in the Coloured Cabarets of New York.” He drew a crowded dance floor, black bodies clothed in white, conjoined in postures of embrace and ecstasy, their heads barely clearing the smoky ceiling and the darkness of the dance floor crosscut by the spotlight’s sharp beam. Just as “Enter, the New Negro” offered an ersatz typology of the cabaret, so “Kit Skyhead” played on sociological discourse, the protagonists surveying the gradations of Harlem venues from the swanky to the skanky. The scene of Harlem cabaret was multiform and heterogeneous, the story suggested, only partly revealing itself to the outsider. But Kit and Mistah are established as true Harlemites, possessed of keen powers of apperception despite their accents. They begin the evening seeking “a real big time” spot, but Kit cautions, “I don’t want to disembarras nobody’s pocket-book” (52). Arriving at the Cotton Club’s “illumined façade,” Kit scowls at “the pompous anterior of the Negro doorman,” asking, “Who’s dat nigger all dressed up like Mrs. Astor’s horse?” Kit and Mistah grease palms to access the Cotton Club, which was notorious for barring black patrons. “After the mystic ritual of transferring a billet of high dimensions to the snowy paw” of the doorman, Kit and Mistah “ascended the richly carpeted stairs to the jangling throne of Bandannaland.” Inside, the black patrons, few and far between, were effectively hidden although black performers occupied center stage. The spectacle is fantastic—“Dawggone,” cries Kit, “if this ain’t the cat’s kanittens” but he realizes “there ain’t another nigger in this place but you and me and the waiters” (52). The sketch can be read as pandering to stereotypes; Kit and Mistah act wild, obey their appetites, and utter malapropisms. But it is very self-aware, and its critique of the Cotton Club’s practice of packaging blackness for white consumption is shrewdly delivered.
Their “adventures” lead to the Bamville Nest, where guests are enjoying themselves because they have money to spend and white folks are not much in evidence.
Boys the colour of chocolate pudding, hair black and sleek; tall, slender youths, a bored, brother-there-ain’t-a-doggone-thing-you-can-tell-me look in their eyes. Night hawks. Big timers. Niggers with “plenty money.” Racehorse touts. Bolita men. California jacks. Two storey guys. Women, the shimmer of pearls, slippers of gold, the yellow ombre, tell you what it is all about. High lifers, laughing, agreeable, hilarious folks. Here to this cabaret come the black stars of the city’s revues […] to sing and dance and sup and say hello to the folks. Here every man is a sheik and every girl is willing to go fifty-fifty with you on a proposition. (52)
But to truly be themselves Kit and Mistah head to Sonny Decent’s, the “openest” cabaret in Harlem, a joint that looks “as if it were hewn out of a tree trunk.” The lack of pretense extends to the patrons, who address the proprietor by his first name, “lie prostrate” about the place, and exude a tawdry charisma. The men take seats near “a primitive coal stove,” the patrons dark enough to be called “blue.” “Hordes of blue people. Blue girls stunning in tomato reds … one of them, a dainty brown elf, wearing a dress of rich henna with a basket weave. Hats to match. Cup hats. Blinker-effect. High yellows of the Spanish type, exhilarating in peacock blue. Girls, dainty, somber, cynical-eyed, passion-mouthed” (100). The sketch tilts perilously toward primitivism, the women objects of a salacious gaze, the music “an incessant boom-booming, tom-tom-ing” that evokes “Africa undraped!” (100). “All Sonny asks of his heterogeneous patrons is that they be nice,” Walrond writes. “They may fight and cut each other’s throats, but boys, for God’s sake, be nice!” (100). Guests talk back to the stage and play the dozens, hurling pungent insults. One patron, told he should “to go to church,” retorts, “Nigger, you’re a policeman and I’m a gambler. What you want me to go to church fo’. Go yo’ self” (100).
If the scene is lewd, Walrond nevertheless affirms its vitality and importance to the community. “You’ve got to be part of the underworld pattern to fit in” at Sonny Decent’s, but that pattern was nothing less than the obverse of the image respectable Harlem sought to showcase. It was a place where “the family feeling runs high” and “a sort of laboratory for song and dance,” a creative cauldron where “the jazz steps you see on Broadway […] are first tried out.” The songs are shamelessly suggestive, as in “The American woman eats her chicken and rice/ And thinks she’s eatin’ somethin’ nice/ But she ain’t eat nuthin’ till she tries/ Some monkey hips and dumplin’” (100). This was the blues before it was captured on vinyl, dance before it was codified for Broadway, jazz before Duke Ellington took it to radio. Was it a romantic view of the folk? Perhaps. But it was also an assertion of the integrity of expressive forms whose source lay in an impoverished class, the “degraded tenth” disparaged in the rhetoric of respectability. It is no surprise that perusing the crowd at Sonny Decent’s, Kit and Mistah spot none other than Miguel Covarrubias and Eric Walrond. The author wished to be understood as “part of the underworld pattern” even as he enjoyed access to finer establishments.
To be clear, the prevailing discourse of respectability did not simply reflect the privilege or priggishness of its advocates. It was strategically responsive to popular notions about African American inferiority that had attained quasi-scientific status. Many felt that references to violence, sexuality, and deficiencies of intellect and ambition ought to be, if not scrubbed from African American texts, then handled with extreme delicacy. However, Walrond’s cabaret writing celebrated the lower class by depicting it as imaginative, resourceful, and most importantly, engaged in interclass dynamics that did not entail being shamed or uplifted.
The Charleston “craze” was central to these class dynamics as Walrond addressed them in Vanity Fair. It was preposterous, he felt, that this dance was identified with Broadway or imagined to have its source with any choreographer. He sought the origins of this “dance which is exciting the mineral, animal, emotional, and vegetable life of the United States” (“Charleston” 73). The absurdity, for Walrond, was not just the zealous appropriation of black forms, it was the proliferation of claims to having originated something that was “an integrally triumphant part of every show and musical comedy of consequence in New York,” a figure for black expressiveness itself (73). He satirized the eagerness among whites to locate racial authenticity in an urban, black middle class. A “new profession” had arisen in Harlem: “Charleston instructor.”
The mulatto maids of white actresses, in addition to their traditional chores of teaching their principals how to sing darky songs or talk “nigger” talk, are now engaged with an eye to their dexterity at dancing the Charleston. Coloured men […] are engaged to conduct classes in the Charleston to which come the smart folk of Park Avenue. And in Greenwich Village the new symbol of revolt is for some flame-eyed, dusk-faced Shelley […] to jump up and down […] yelling “Charleston, Hey! Hey!” (73)
The irony was that none of them possessed an uncomplicated claim to the Charleston, whose source, Walrond contended, was the black belt of the American South. Cabaret dancers and “Negro theatres” adapted it, devising “new projections in rhythm.” Black performers, “freed from the trappings of character” at the end of long nights onstage, repaired to Lenox Avenue’s Capitol Club and “invented most of the steps and slants and little slyly obscene twists now a vital part of the dance.” To New York’s adaptations, Chicagoans added “the black bottom” and the “scronch” and “Charleston tango.” “Active as churns, other black belts began drenching dark portions of the country with vivid improvisations in the Charleston mood,” until “the Charleston began its siege of the citadels of major sanctity,” entering high society (116).
Improvisation, migration, collaboration, adaptation: Walrond’s account of the Charleston indexed the history of the African American working class. Whether peasant, proletarian, or professional, this was the community whose character his cabaret writing celebrated. If it was lewd, primitivist, and sensational, it was nevertheless concerned to highlight the ingenuity and self-expression of a class whose way of life was cast as inimical to the advancement of the race. When Mistah takes in the crowd at Sonny Decent’s, he marvels, “Why at this rate there won’t be a single dishwasher nowhere in New York no time befo’ four o’clock next week” (100).
Walrond’s Caribbeanness seems illegible in Vanity Fair, his authority predicated on suppressing signs of his difference. One form of passing effectively concealed another; moving across class lines, he represented black vernacular and the signature idioms of “everynight life,” but in the process he staged his relation to “the Negro” as one of seamless identity. On closer inspection, however, his cabaret writing betrays the trace of Caribbeanness. “Ain’t you a West Indian?” someone asks Kit Skyhead, whose denial is instructive. “Who, me? A West Indian? Brother, you ain’t lookin’ for trouble is ya? I’ve had mo’ fights on account o’ dat dan fo’ anything else in the world. I look like any monkey man?” (100). The offense he takes is meant to illustrate the animosity between African Americans and West Indians. But the exchange also suggests an equivocation between race and nation, the indeterminacy of Kit’s appearance undermining the American identity his speaking voice anchors. In this sense, the exchange is a figure for the entire narrative performance in which Walrond’s cabaret writing engaged, the authenticity of his voice belying a foreignness that threatened to unmask it.
For all their sensuality, Walrond’s sketches actually suppressed much of what made the cabaret scene transgressive. While flouting some conventions of respectability, he omitted the more radical challenge to gender, race, and sexual difference in the cabaret scene. “Elaborately costumed crossdressers at Harlem drag balls, public wedding ceremonies for black lesbian couples, speakeasies entertaining racially and sexually mixed crowds with illicit drinks and sexually explicit performances—transgressive sexuality clearly represented a visible facet of life during the Harlem Renaissance.”97 The cabarets surveyed by Kit and Mistah hardly suggest the spectrum of performances and activities that subverted norms of gender, race, and sexuality. For Walrond, this included parties at which clothing and other vestiges of personal modesty were shed, and visits to “buffet flats,” where one paid to watch sex acts. His relationship with Van Vechten was, if not his introduction to this scene, then its intensification.
Carl Van Vechten was married to the actress Fania Marinoff but had homosexual partners. His journals indicate that he spent a great deal of time with Walrond in late 1924 and early 1925, some of it in intellectual pursuits, much of it at performances and events. Cullen was their frequent companion, as was Donald Angus, an actor with whom Van Vechten consorted. Walrond introduced him to many black New Yorkers, some of whom became friends and confidants. Prior to writing Nigger Heaven, Van Vechten covered music and dance for the New York Times and the New York Post, fields that “would later inform his sense of a black aesthetic.”98 Despite this established interest, he has been seen as a patronizing opportunist. A month after meeting Walrond, he wrote Gertrude Stein in Paris, “There is always something in New York, and this winter it is Negro poets and jazz pianists.”99 The charismatic Walrond was his ideal connection to Harlem. Through his camaraderie, Van Vechten became a fixture at Small’s Paradise, on Seventh Avenue. A popular song at the time, “Go Harlem,” told listeners to “go inspectin’ like Van Vechten.”100
But he was not just enjoying an extended slumming expedition or exploiting people; he genuinely befriended them.101 To James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Nella Larsen, Paul and Eslanda Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, A’Lelia Walker, Ethel Waters, Langston Hughes, and Harold Jackman he was “dear Carlo,” his Park Avenue home the site of vigorous discussions of culture high and low and of racially integrated parties anomalous for their time. Several friends formed lasting bonds and when the time came defended Nigger Heaven against criticism. Van Vechten’s journals and correspondence convey the depth of their devotion. Harold Jackman confessed, “You are the first white man with whom I have felt perfectly at ease. You are just like a colored man! I don’t know if you will consider this a compliment or not, but that’s the only way I can put it.”102 Hughes wished “I could write you every day if it meant getting your delightful notes in return.”103 Cynics may say Hughes had every reason to charm the man who was at that moment helping place The Weary Blues with Knopf, but the evidence does not support simplistic accounts of these relationships.
4.6 Photograph of Carl Van Vechten, self-portrait, 1934.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Courtesy of the Van Vechten Trust.
Admittedly, Walrond made use of Van Vechten’s interest. When they met, Van Vechten was contemplating a proposal from George Gershwin to collaborate on a “Negro” themed opera.104 Four days later, however, he was contemplating a solo project instead. “I’ve been thinking more about the opera & I have more ideas,” he told his wife, “but I’m sure Gershwin wants something different, and nothing will come of it. In that case I think I’ll write a Negro novel.”105 It would be another year before he began Nigger Heaven, but Walrond clearly met him at its germinal stage. He gave Van Vechten some of his work to read, most likely the cabaret writing, which Crowninshield published in the following year. One November afternoon found Van Vechten “reading Eric Walrond’s manuscripts” between perusal of “some extraordinary pornographic Japanese prints” and dinner with Edna Kenton.106 He responded eagerly, “You are, I think, one of the three most promising younger talents that I have run into during the past three years. I am particularly delighted that you write as an artist and not as a defender of the faith. You do not apologize or explain or exhort—you set down the truth as you see it. More than that—you can write!”107
Walrond saw Van Vechten regularly that winter. Although much of their activity involved “respectable” events, they had many queer companions and disreputable destinations. Queer Harlem was as much a draw for Van Vechten as black Harlem, and he frequented speakeasies and buffet flats such as Buddie Baker’s and Cecil Fields’ catering to a gay crowd. At the home of Lewis Baer, an editor at Albert & Charles Boni, they joined parties of gay cabaret performers. As well, Walrond introduced Van Vechten to African American women he may not have met otherwise, including Dorothy Peterson, A’Lelia Walker, Nora Holt, Nella Larsen, Ethel Ray Nance, and Regina Anderson. With and without them, Walrond and Van Vechten frequented cabarets where Van Vechten diligently recorded the names of waiters and dancers. Despite nursing what he called “a powerful hangover” one Wednesday in early 1925, he was delighted to have Walrond appear at his door accompanied by Jean Toomer, whom he had never met. They were joined by Cullen, Jackman, Gipsy Johnson, and Donald Angus, “who does the Charleston.” Two nights later, Walrond returned to Van Vechten’s for a dinner with an extensive interracial guest list. Hardly a night passed that a fascinating personage failed to lure Van Vechten out: “After dinner, about 10, we go to bed,” he wrote in March. “But Tallulah Bankhead telephones & we go over to the Gotham to drink champagne with her & her maid.”108
As Walrond introduced Van Vechten to Harlem he extended his own connections downtown. The transition was not without its attending anxieties. Walrond was proud, for example, that The Independent published his essay on Garvey but worried that Van Vechten would criticize it. “I hope you will not fail to recall that it was originally done for the Russian Bolshevik press and was later cut down and tightened up to suit the exigencies of local consumption.”109 This was the same letter in which he called himself a “pitiable object for a Freudian psychologist” and “a terrible searcher after things that are not always clear to me.” Walrond’s routine of working hard and playing harder was, it seems, a strategy for coping with the depression he could not dispel. Lamenting his “boorish” propensity for offending people, he worried about his “sorry condition.”
[I]t will probably mean that half of the people whom I care about most in the world will sooner or later pass me up entirely or graciously and charitably let it go at that … All of which is sometimes quite distressing to me. I have however managed to effect an escape in my work and the multitudinous things I am fond of, such as bumming around Harlem, sitting at the feet of women like Rose McClendon or absorbing the inimitable chatter flying about one in an unabashed Negro cabaret.
His experience was at odds with the effulgence of Van Vechten’s accounts. One evening Walrond took him and Avery Hopwood to 580 (“a lot of girls and Winold Reiss”) and on to A’Lelia Walker’s (“more people but no drinks”) where he parted ways with Van Vechten, who went to dance at the Bamville Nest until 4 a.m. But instead of returning home, he went “to join Eric at Small’s.”110 From Van Vechten’s account, it was another Roaring Twenties night on the town, but Walrond’s letter the next day puts it in a desultory light.
I think it was exceedingly fine of you to leave your friends and come to Small’s last night just to counsel with me. I am sure no man could wish for a diviner manifestation of interest and concern. Your words kept recurring to me so that I simply had to jot this off to you. You remember you once told me whenever I needed a firm hand-clasp (there is no attempt here to be literal) that I was at liberty to call on you? Well, here I am.111
He was desperate for reassurance. Van Vechten must have told him to avoid petty arguments and not fret about his impetuousness.
Yes, I realize if I am to get on that I’ve got to stop annoying people on grounds that are absolutely senseless. I really do not know why I should be this way. Outwardly I know I am incapable of perpetrating any injury on anyone; but inwardly or rather unconsciously I am beginning to suspect that I must be vicious or vituperative or something of the kind. All of which, of course, is unimportant as you so generously indicated to me last night. Of course all the items that have ever got me in Dutch with people have been of a decidedly perishable quality, but I did them either as exercises in certain forms of contemporary expression or as a means of keeping the wolf at bay.
The last assertion is especially perplexing. What “forms of contemporary expression” had caused offense? What “wolf” was he keeping at bay, and by what means? He felt like his own worst enemy, inadvertently sabotaging his self-presentation. The word “remorse” began appearing frequently in Van Vechten’s journals too, notes Bruce Kellner, “always after a night of heavy drinking, although the context often suggests some other activity for which remorse might have been inevitable.”112 After staying out late with Walrond, Toomer, and Jackman at Small’s and the Nest, Van Vechten arose “at 10 with a hangover and remorse.” The high life was not easy for either man to sustain.
In a sense, this was a tremendous period for Walrond. “Kit Skyhead” ran in the same issue of Vanity Fair as Van Vechten’s article on Gershwin; his essay “The Negro Literati” appeared; and The New Republic published his review of Walter White’s Fire in the Flint. Opportunity announced that his “Voodoo’s Revenge” won a prize in its first fiction contest, and Crowninshield wanted more for Vanity Fair, “a series of Harlem personalities.”113 After a Paul Robeson concert in Greenwich Village, Walrond spoke to Waldo Frank, who had guided Toomer’s Cane to Horace Liveright, and Frank said “to be sure and send him a batch of my stuff.”114 He suffered no lack of attention from women, some of whom—such as Louella Tucker, A’Lelia Walker, and Rita Romilly—may have been his lovers. Of Romilly, a white actress who taught at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Van Vechten wrote, “I think [she] is going to have an affair with Eric. She sees him at every conceivable moment.”115
Moreover, he had become an ambassador for the younger generation. Locke relied on him to provide editorial assistance to New Negro contributors, and he issued invitations to guests of the Writers Guild.116 But no one praised his ambassadorship more glowingly than Aaron Douglas, who arrived in 1925 and became one of the most celebrated visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Although he was broke and unemployed, Douglas wrote optimistically to his fiancée in Kansas City that Walrond and a friend of his, a retail store promoter, were “enthusiastic over my prospects.” “Eric is a wonderful fellow,” Douglas added, “I venture to say there isn’t another fellow in town anywhere near his age with as wide an acquaintance.”117
Well, sweetheart, my two friends Emanuel Pomerantz and Eric Walrond have kept my head above water. They have been brothers to me in the truest sense of the word. They not only aided me, but would raise—with me for saying I had money when I didn’t. I haven’t yet ask[ed] either for a cent, but they never see me without placing some cash at my disposal. […] Walrond’s hot after a scholarship for me, and might get it.
Having met Douglas in Kansas City, Walrond sought to ease his transition and introduce him around. In fact, Locke felt Walrond overreached on Douglas’s behalf. Told that Walrond was “handling” Douglas’s work, placing it “in the hands of several editors, Vanity Fair and the Boston Transcript,” Locke “appeared quite fussed. He told me in pretty good English that he could do more with my work than Walrond.” Further illustrating his activity on behalf of emerging artists, Walrond helped secure Casper Holstein’s financial support for the Opportunity contests.118
However, early 1925 took a severe toll on Walrond’s mental health. One week after the Opportunity banquet that May, at which he was awarded third prize for fiction, he wrote Joseph Freeman, “I am particularly depressed these days, that is why I didn’t write you before, and I am actually engaged in the absorbing process of counting the minutes of my existence—as if I were a condemned man.”119 Alarmed, Freeman replied, “The words in your letter which moved me most were the dark ones about counting minutes like a condemned man. I hurry to write: has the reprieve come yet? It does, sooner or later; even for us who so violently swing between heaven and hell.” It is an exchange between people who understand themselves as depressives, suffering the “violent swings” of what today might be considered bipolar disorder. Walrond’s behavior grew erratic, upsetting Van Vechten. When he stopped by Walrond’s apartment, they walked to an antique bookstore and then dropped in on Hurston and Sol Johnson, finding neither. Returning to “Eric’s room,” he surprised Van Vechten by abruptly making “another engagement.” Van Vechten stormed out “not very pleased,” but the next morning Walrond called to apologize.120 This was the day he wrote of feeling like “a condemned man.”
Walrond’s private expressions of pain are at striking odds with the litany of successes and festivities he enjoyed. Consider that the weekend before his “condemned man” note he attended the Opportunity awards dinner and Paul Robeson’s performance, after which he made a promising pitch to Waldo Frank, then joined Fauset, White, Romilly, Jackman, the Van Dorens, and Hurston for a party at the home of Winold Reiss. And Nora Holt danced nude! Nowhere are the antinomies of Walrond’s experience thrown into starker relief than in this first week of May 1925. Concerned for his friend’s well-being, Freeman suggested Walrond contact Roger Baldwin to see about finding him a job. Baldwin was the executive director of the ACLU and the son of the Urban League cofounder, Ruth Standish Baldwin. He was well connected in New York, and Walrond not only contacted him, he poured out his soul. “I told him everything,” he wrote Freeman, “Just what I was up against, what I wanted to do, what I felt I could do, what I had done, whence I came and wither I ought to be bound … I told him that I felt I ought to be attached pretty soon to something definite—that if after the summer I didn’t get what I wanted (or an approximation of that) I should go back to the sea and the easy death that comes with it.”
But Walrond did not hear from Baldwin and asked Freeman to follow up. “I will soon,” he replied, “to find out what he has done to save you from the sea.”121 That night, Walrond and Louella Tucker went to Small’s, where they met Van Vechten and Lawrence Langner, founder of the Theatre Guild and the Washington Square Players. He and Tucker joined Van Vechten a week later to attend Regina Anderson’s birthday party. Walrond and Van Vechten left there for the Bamville Nest, and this was the last anyone saw of Walrond for a long time. Two days later, A’Lelia Walker gave a benefit for Augusta Savage and, although many of his friends attended, Walrond was absent. The following weekend the regular crew made the usual rounds—Small’s, the Nest—but without Walrond. He even missed Countée Cullen’s college graduation party.122
That Walrond was not at peace is clear in his attenuated correspondence with Van Vechten. One attempt at reconciliation was a birthday telegram, a plaintive message. “I’ve exhausted half a dozen telegraph blanks trying to send you an appropriate birthday greeting and all I can get out of my sluggish bean is a gentle handclasp for you today. Tiger flowers and honeysuckle.” He signed himself, “Your Harlem Buddy.” The other was a letter that sounded newsy but betrayed evidence of its author’s turmoil, continually calling attention to its own failures of expression. “This isn’t the sort of letter I want to write you,” it began, “But a bad beginning is better, I think, than no beginning at all.”123 The letter consists of thought fragments, and Walrond’s failure to express himself satisfactorily is legible in its very structure, each incompleteness occasioning a postscript, which in turn occasioned another postscript. Each item he raised to impress or hearten Van Vechten or himself failed.
Covarrubias has done a marvelous drawing to illustrate the Vanity Fair article and the other day when I was down there Mr. Crowninshield spoke to me about another article—a series of vignettes of Harlem personalities. I am, I think, to see either him or Miss Case further about it.
While I am at it, I know you’d be interested to know that I took to Mr. Rose yesterday the article I did on “The Negro Literati” for “Brentano’s Book Chat” and he said it was the best thing he’d had for the number.
I’ve got a new story—a story this time—“Black Hawk” and I’m just itching for an opportunity to have you read it.
Yours very sincerely,
Eric
p.s. Oh, never mind, but this is terrible. I intended adding, “When do I see you again?” E.
p.s. #2 I got a note from Bob Littell of the “New Republic” the other day saying that my review of Walter White’s book is scheduled to appear soon. Quoting from that letter, I find that, according to the review, “it sounds like a book I must read.” So much for that …
I had Roland Hayes on the telephone last night and he certainly relished the idea of coming to see you. He had a terrible cold and I am wondering how his concert came off tonight. He told me that he is leaving town immediately after the concert tonight and won’t be back this way again before the 27th when he fills another engagement.
In the meantime I am to communicate with him and if nothing untoward takes place he feels certain he’ll be able, if it is convenient to you, to take advantage of your splendid interest.
E.
I don’t know whether this will interest you or not, but Monday, Jun. 19 there’s going to be a performance of the National Ethiopian Theatre at the New Manhattan Casino …
I’ve got tickets for it and this morning one of the most charming ladies in the world called me up and asked me if I wouldn’t be so nice as to sit in her box, etc. In that box, I assure you, will be some women like Mme. Walker whom it wouldn’t be a bad thing for you to know …
But anyway, don’t let me sell the idea to you. I promise if you can possibly make it that these girls will make it pretty interesting for you …
Eric
There are no fewer than four attempts to close the letter. In light of Walrond’s precipitous decline and the birthday telegram sent the same day, it reads like a document of despair.
Locke was concerned about him now. Walrond had still not completed “The Mirrors of Harlem” and Locke met with him to discuss it. A few days later, Locke visited Van Vechten to discuss “Langston Hughes, Eric Walrond, Spirituals & other matters.”124 The next day, Walrond sounded chastened in sending Locke the revision: “I have tried my best to adhere to every suggestion you made while we went over it Sunday, and I hope I have succeeded in making it just as you want it.” Though addressed lightheartedly to “My dear Lockus,” the letter was signed formally, “With best regards, I beg to remain, Your devoted friend, Eric.”125 The self-reproach extended into the following month, when he apologized to Locke for being such a recluse and missing him “the innumerable times you called.”126 Walrond did not attend Van Vechten’s “wild” forty-fifth birthday party, nor did he join Romilly and Van Vechten on the train two weeks later to visit A’Lelia Walker at her estate on the Hudson. He did not see Van Vechten again until the Crisis awards ceremony that summer, and thereafter their encounters were few and far between, always at public gatherings, and never discussed in Van Vechten’s journal.127 Walrond referred obliquely to the depression that consumed his spring and summer when he told Locke in August of “the chaotic state of affairs surrounding me.”
These struggles had acquainted Walrond with what his Columbia writing teacher, Dorothy Scarborough, called “the night side of the soul,” dimensions of himself that resisted rationality or conscious direction. In response, he had taken refuge in the night side of Harlem’s soul, a libidinal subculture that mirrored in reverse the self-disciplined community of strivers projected by the proponents of racial uplift. But he had trouble sustaining it, and the drinking, dancing, carousing, arguing, and apologizing seem to have been palliative measures, failing to fulfill his ambition, which traveled the traditional channels of intellectual labor and publication. Nor did they express his ethnic difference, to which he clung despite his devotion to African American culture. Fortunately, two important developments in the summer of 1925 helped stabilize Walrond’s mental health and impose order on “the chaotic state of affairs surrounding me.”
One was the offer of a position as business manager at Opportunity, which he assumed in August. It is unclear precisely how the job came about, but Joseph Freeman was likely involved, given his relationship with Urban League officers. It helped that Walrond had published in Opportunity, won a fiction prize, secured Holstein’s funding for the contests, and collaborated with Charles Johnson. Walrond’s versatility made him a good fit, bridging Opportunity’s dual mission to cover “the social and economic problems affecting Negro life” and to promote “Negro authors, creative writers, and artists.”128 Walrond’s time at Opportunity was brief, but it was a pivotal period for the journal, which nearly doubled its circulation.129 His administrative savvy became instrumental as the journal expanded its contests and roster of artists. Two of Walrond’s friends joined the staff: Gwendolyn Bennett wrote the column “The Ebony Flute” from 1926 to 1928 and Countée Cullen, who completed a master’s degree at Harvard, returned to New York and wrote the column “The Dark Tower” until 1928.
The other stabilizing development in the summer of 1925 was literary. Walrond was writing new material and felt cautiously optimistic. He told Locke in July, “I’ve been doing a lot of stuff since I last saw you, but much of it, I imagine, is a bit too esoteric for provincial consumption.”130 These were the stories that became Tropic Death, none of them set in the United States. This new fiction attempted at least two things without precedent in North America. He attended to “peasant” life in the Caribbean from an insider’s perspective, rooting it in the experience of colonial subjectivity. And he enlisted in this effort an engagement with Caribbean folk speech that did not reduce it to mere dialect and was so intricate and extensive that it could not be heard as local color or narrative tourism.
We may be inured today to the strangeness of Walrond’s project because Caribbean diaspora writers have developed sophisticated models for such an engagement. But one need only recall how recently Caribbean speech attained literary status to grasp the audacity of his effort in the 1920s. Even Claude McKay, who published Creole verse in Jamaica, was only persuaded to do it by an Englishman who believed somewhat fatuously that it was McKay’s most natural voice. Stuart Hall suggests the audacity of Walrond’s project in his remarks on Caribbean English.
To encounter people who can speak to one another in exactly that transformation of Standard English which is patois, which is creole—the hundreds of different creole and semi-creole languages that cover the face of the Caribbean in one place or another—that these have become, as it were, the languages in which important things can be said, in which important aspirations and hopes can be formulated, in which an important grasp of the histories that have made these places can be written down, in which artists are willing, for the first time, the first generation, to practise, that is what I call a cultural revolution.131
Walrond wrote a generation before the revolution to which Hall refers. It was a quixotic choice to employ Caribbean English to formulate important hopes and aspirations, to say important things, and to record an important grasp of the histories that made these places. He risked being misread and, as we will see, he often was.
