INTRODUCTION
1. Ethel Ray Nance, interview by Ann Allen Shockley, November 18 and December 23, 1970 (Charles S. Johnson Collection, Fisk University Library), 14.
2. Robert Bone, Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction, 202.
3. Robert Bone papers, private possession of Louis J. Parascandola.
4. Aaron Douglas to Alta Sawyer, undated, Aaron Douglas Papers, SCNYPL.
6. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 128.
7. Johnson to Alain Locke, January 27, 1925, ALP, Box 164–40, Folder 25.
8. Charles Rowell, “‘Let Me Be With Ole Jazzbo’: An Interview with Sterling A. Brown,” Callaloo 14 (1991): 811.
9. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Five Books,” Crisis (January 1927): 152.
10. Donald Friede correspondence, August 31, 1927, Box 51, HFP.
1. GUYANA AND BARBADOS (1898–1911)
1. Frank Sullivan interview with Walrond, Footnotes of Good Books, October 1926, WFP.
2. When Benjamin Prout died, he had $6,530 of working capital, which as Robert Bone observes was “a substantial, if not a magnificent sum” in those days (5).
3. Robert Bone, Unpublished biography of Eric Walrond, Private collection of Louis J. Parascandola, 5–6. Any account of Walrond’s childhood must rely on the biography Professor Bone began drafting in the mid-1980s. Although he was unable to complete the biography due to illness, Bone interviewed Walrond’s grandson, his cousin, and other family in Barbados, conducting research in the Department of Archives, Black Rock, St. Michael. Bone’s work is invaluable, but it raises problems of interpretation for subsequent studies. They are especially acute in connection with British Guiana, which Bone understood to be the origin of Walrond’s inner conflicts and the animating source of his literary gift. For Bone, an avowed Freudian, British Guiana threw into stark relief the two competing domains of human existence that Walrond struggled to reconcile: civilization and barbarism. The present study rejects certain constructions Bone put on his research even as it relies on that research.
6. Sir George William Des Voeux, My Colonial Service in British Guiana, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Newfoundland, and Hong Kong, Vol. I, 115.
7. Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905, 240; Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 3rd ed., 131.
8. Bone, Unpublished biography, 20.
9. Rodney, A History, 196.
10. Walrond’s stories of Guyana, most of which he wrote in England, are highly autobiographical. These include “The Coolie’s Wedding,” “The Servant Girl,” and “Two Sisters.” However, I have avoided drawing on his fiction for particulars of his life when it does not otherwise comport with biographical fact, as in Tropic Death’s “The White Snake.”
11. Rodney, A History, 225, 229; Knight, The Caribbean, 213.
12. Rodney, A History, 196.
14. Hubert Critchlow, “History of the Labour Union Movement in British Guiana,” 42.
15. Rodney, A History, 192.
16. The 1904 British Guiana Directory & Almanack lists a self-employed tailor named Walrond at 189 Church Street. Although the first initials do not match, it is possible that this was William’s shop. If so, it was not far from the principal targets of looting and arson along Water Street.
17. To this day, an area called Proutes lies a half-mile north of Flat Rock, near Highway 3.
18. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 128.
19. Bone, Unpublished biography, 21.
20. Knight, The Caribbean, 259–62; Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969, 366.
21. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, 36–37, 57.
22. Another fictionalized account of the Walronds’ move to Jackman’s Gap appears in “The Black Pin.”
23. Transcripts of interviews with Canal workers are compiled in Lancelot Lewis, The West Indian in Panama; and in Bonham Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). George Westerman also conducted a number of interviews, transcripts of which are in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
24. Lewis, The West Indian in Panama, 31–32.
25. Matthew Parker, Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal, 277.
26. On the “Colón Man” in Caribbean folk culture, see Rhonda Frederick, Colón Man a Come: Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005).
27. Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal, 30; Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850–1914, 93.
2. PANAMA (1911–1918)
1. On the discourse of “tropicality” and its ambivalent investment in the Caribbean as either repulsive or attractive, see Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, 4–24; J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context, 21–42; Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 36.
2. Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Inter Pocula, 160.
3. Robert Tomes, Panama in 1855, 56.
4. Mestizaje resulted from contact between Europeans, West Indians, and Latin Americans and the indigenous people. Aims McGuinness offers a nuanced account of Panama’s history of interethnic contact in Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush, 22–25.
5. John Major, Prize Possession: The United States Government and the Panama Canal, 1903–1979, 63.
6. Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969, 422–23.
7. Max Salabarría Patiño, La Ciudad de Colón en los Predios de Historia (Panama: Litho Editorial Chen, 2002), 17.
8. Thomas Graham Grier, On the Canal Zone, 15–36; Máximo Ochy, “Vida Material en la Zona del Canal de Panamá” (2003), permanent exhibit of El Museo del Canal Interoceanico, Panama City.
9. George Westerman, “Historical Notes on West Indians on the Isthmus of Panama,” Phylon 22 (1961): 342.
10. On Bottle Alley prostitution and gambling, see David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914, 147.
11. Westerman, “Historical Notes,” 345.
12. On the violent nature of everyday life in the Canal Zone, see Lancelot Lewis, The West Indian in Panama; Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal; and Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850–1914.
13. Greene, Canal Builders, 136–37.
14. Lewis, West Indian, 45–77; Rhonda Frederick, Colón Man a Come: Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration, 19–90; Greene, Canal Builders, 133–58.
15. Westerman,“Historical Notes,” 341–42.
17. Data on Panama schools are from Schooling in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904–1979, 101–106.
19. Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, 146.
21. A Trip—Panama Canal, 165.
22. That “Wind in the Palms” may be read autobiographically is indicated in Walrond’s essay “From British Guiana to Roundway,” where he writes, “As a junior clerk, checking and filing the reports on the war to exterminate the mosquito, observing the comings and goings of the field staff, overhearing talk about the tenements unfit for human habitation and about the case of the Sanitary Inspector who had involved the Department in a lawsuit in his ‘cleaning up’ zeal over in Colon, I obtained a kind of ‘bird’s eye’ view of the measures which had not only made the construction of the canal possible, but had made the Canal Zone one of the healthiest places in Latin America” (1).
23. Linguists call this front focusing, introducing the main verb or clause then repeating it in its standard syntactic place to create emphasis. See Shondel Nero, “Notes on Caribbean English” in “Winds Can Wake Up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader, ed. Louis Parascandola, 46.
24. Three other Colón stories Walrond wrote in England are discussed in chapter 10.
26. Albert V. McGeachy, The History of the Panama Star & Herald, 3.
27. “Sixty-Seven Years Old Today, a Retrospect,” Star & Herald (February 28, 1916): 4.
28. Star & Herald, August 1, 1917; August 4, 1917.
29. Grant, Negro with a Hat, 147.
30. Robert Hill, The Marcus Garvey and United Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. I, 182.
31. Preface to “The Godless City”; “Adventures in Misunderstanding.”
3. NEW YORK (1918–1923)
1. The ship’s manifest for June 20, 1918, is available at www.ellisisland.org. His name is misspelled Wolrond.
2. The 1920 Federal Census records roughly nine thousand West Indian residents of Brooklyn and thirty-six thousand in Harlem out of ninety-six thousand total in the United States.
3. The immigration wave in which Walrond participated led to a five-fold increase in the number of foreign-born blacks in the United States in thirty years, from roughly twenty thousand at the turn of the century to nearly one hundred thousand in 1930. In New York City, the foreign-born black population more than tripled during the decade in which Walrond arrived, the vast majority of whom were West Indian. See Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race, 25, 41.
4. “Harlem Happenings,” Chicago Defender (August 24, 1918): 5.
5. Walrond’s 1927 application to the Guggenheim Foundation included a detailed work history. He reported working a year and a half at the Broad Street Hospital. See also Walrond, “From British Guiana,” 2.
6. “Additions to the New Broad Street Hospital,” New York Times (Feb. 23, 1919).
7. Ira de Augustine Reid, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937, 118–21; Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America, 80.
8. See, for example, “The Color of the Caribbean,” The World Tomorrow (May 1927): 225–27.
9. Reid, Negro Immigrant, 68.
10. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, 85.
11. James, Holding Aloft, 85.
12. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 165–66.
13. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan, 3, 147.
15. Tony Martin, African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey’s Harlem Renaissance, 7–8.
16. Marcus Garvey, “Editorial,” Negro World (Dec. 6, 1919): 1.
17. Marcus Garvey, Message to the People: The Course of African Philosophy, 5.
18. Bone, Unpublished biography, 2.
19. David Levering Lewis writes, “For Walrond, debonair and superior, to have flirted with Garveyism was a measure of the bitterness of those days” (When Harlem Was in Vogue, 128).
20. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 156.
22. James, Holding Aloft, 111.
23. Robert Hill, The Marcus Garvey and United Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. XI, ccxli–ccccxlvii; Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, 148.
24. Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal, 368–69; Michael Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981, 29–52.
25. Grant, Negro With a Hat, 148.
26. Hill, MG/UNIA Papers, Vol. II, 181.
27. Tony Martin, Literary Garveyism, 168.
28. By early 1920, Negro World’s circulation was roughly ten thousand; the following year, under Harrison’s guidance, it rose to fifty thousand. See Jeffrey Perry, A Hubert Harrison Reader, 441, fn 18.
29. Walrond appeared on the masthead as assistant to the editor on December 24, 1921; his title changed to associate editor on March 18, 1922.
30. Tony Martin charges Walrond with opportunism in Literary Garveyism. Robert Bone’s characterization of the Negro World writing as dilettantism appears in chapter 2 of his unpublished Walrond biography.
31. Garvey was denounced in the pages of The Crisis, Opportunity, and The Messenger, the most influential black journals, as a “monumental monkey,” an “unquestioned fool and ignoramus,” and “the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world.” See John Runcie, “Marcus Garvey and the Harlem Renaissance,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 10:2 (July 1986): 10–11.
32. On Batouala in relation to anticolonial French literature, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, 69–98.
34. Martin, African Fundamentalism, 24–5.
35. Robert Hill, Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, 203.
36. Martin, Literary Garveyism, 128–9.
37. Hughes to Locke, May 1923. ALP, Box 164–38, Folder 5.
38. Walrond believed the silence about Pushkin’s African ancestry indicated “a journalistic conspiracy to suppress every ennobling fact about the Negro” (Martin, African Fundamentalism, 134). He reviewed white authors, including Max Eastman, Harold Stearns, T. S. Stribling, and Lafcadio Hearn, but focused on people of African descent.
39. Martin, African Fundamentalism, 319.
40. Blanche Colton Williams, How To Study “The Best Short Stories,” vii.
41. City College transcript, GFP.
42. Andrew M. Fearnley, “Eclectic Club,” 327.
43. Martin, Literary Garveyism, 36.
44. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home, 93. Tenue de rigueur translates roughly as “formally dressed.”
45. These included the Jamaicans Claude McKay, J. A. Rogers, Amy Ashwood, and W. A. Domingo; the Communists Cyril Briggs (Nevis), Grace Campbell (Jamaica/Georgia), and Otto Huiswoud (Dutch Guiana); Arthur Schomburg, Eulalie Spence (a classmate of Walrond’s at City College and a Jamaican-born playwright), and the redoubtable Hubert Harrison (St. Croix).
46. Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora, 5.
47. Despite the provincial sound of its name, the Dearborn Independent, published by Henry Ford, boasted a national circulation of more than a half million in the mid-1920s.
48. On the polyvocality of Bert Williams’ performances and Walrond’s commentary thereon, see Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky,” 111–12.
51. Led by Attorney General Palmer, the U.S. Department of Justice sought to suppress black radicalism in print, issuing the report “Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications.”
52. Perry, A Hubert Harrison Reader, 189.
56. Martin, Literary Garveyism, 124–32.
57. Runcie, “Marcus Garvey and the Harlem Renaissance,” 8.
58. Grant, Negro With a Hat, 337.
59. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Back to Africa,” Crisis (Feb. 1923): 542.
60. W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Lunatic or a Traitor,” Crisis (May 1924): 8.
61. Martin, African Fundamentalism, 91.
4. THE NEW NEGRO (1923–1926)
1. Frank E. L. Stewart, “Eric Walrond, Tropic Death, and the Predicament of the Colonial Expatriate Writer,” Hiroshima Shudo University Studies in the Humanities and Sciences 38:2 (1997): 42–43.
2. Robert Bone and Louis J. Parascandola, “An Ellis Island of the Soul,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 34:2 (July 2010): 48; Robert Bone, Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction, 185–94.
3. Edna Worthley Underwood, “West Indian Literature: Some Negro Poets of Panama,” West Indian Review [Kingston] (March 1936): 37.
4. Eugene Gordon, “The Negro Press,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 140 (Nov. 1928): 252.
5. Carl Wade, Robert Bone, and Louis Parascandola, “Eric Walrond and the Dynamics of White Patronage,” 151–57.
6. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, xvi.
7. September 15, 1922. Edna Worthley Underwood correspondence, Leonard Axe Library, Pittsburg State University, Kansas. The author wishes to thank Janette Mauk for providing copies.
8. Revised, these became “The Godless City,” Success Magazine (1924); “The Voodoo’s Revenge,” Opportunity (1925); “The Wharf Rats,” Tropic Death (1926); and “The Consulate,” The Spectator [London] (1936).
9. “The Penitent Shows Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s Great Negro Poet, Was Influenced By Shelley,” Negro World, October 21, 1922. Two weeks later, Walrond’s “Books” column included several titles by Underwood.
10. Nance, interview, 13.
11. See Bone and Parascandola, “An Ellis Island.”
12. Tony Martin, African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey’s Harlem Renaissance, 104.
13. Walrond’s claims may sound overstated, but as Irma Watkins-Owens explains, Holstein’s “preeminence in fraternal circles and crusade for Virgin Island citizenship were known and respected, [and] his support of the movement for a civil government was believed to be a key factor in the removal of U.S. naval rule.” Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930, 145–46.
14. Tracing “the trope of the new negro,” Henry Louis Gates identifies the period between 1895 and 1925 as crucial to the term’s elaboration. Some credit Harrison with having popularized the term, others note the currency Garvey gave it before it was adopted by intellectuals and artists, while still others credit Booker T. Washington.
15. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, “The New Negro—What Is He?” The Messenger (August 1920): 73.
16. The United States purchased St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John from Denmark for $25 million in 1917.
17. Its mission was to present “authoritative and unbiased information from both hemispheres, and for interpreting this information from a world standpoint. The Interpreter’s purpose is to foster amity among the nations; cooperation between Capital and Labor; equal opportunity for all; and liberty under law and order.” International Interpreter (May 26, 1923): 1.
18. Reprinted in Martin, African Fundamentalism, 283.
20. “Since I have been in America, it has been my privilege to know some of the finest people in the world here. Unheralded, unsung, untrumpeted, I go into the most amazing of places” (“Godless” 33).
21. Michelle Stephens, “Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death and the Discontents of American Modernity,” 175.
22. Walrond to Bennett, May 22, 1946. Bennett’s “Outline Toward a Memoir” suggests Walrond’s early formative presence. Gwendolyn Bennett Papers, SCNYPL.
25. Nance, interview, 15.
28. J. Saunders Redding, “Playing the Numbers,” North American Review 236 (Dec. 1934): 533.
29. For the second edition of Tropic Death, Walrond rededicated the book to his daughters. It is likely that Holstein provided Walrond an apartment and a stipend.
30. Cullen to Jackman, July 1, 1923, Countee Cullen Papers, JWJ, Box 1, Folder 19.
31. Ibid., August 10, 1923.
32. Page numbers refer to Louis Parascandola, ed., “Winds Can Wake Up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader.
33. By discourse of coloniality I mean the modes of representing and apprehending that emerge from conditions of colonialism and the elaboration of colonial subjectivity, as distinct from colonialist discourse, the modes of representing and apprehending that developed among Western nations pursuing colonial projects.
34. Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora, 5.
35. At its height in 1927 and 1928, Opportunity’s circulation was 11,000, roughly 12 percent of The Crisis peak circulation in 1919. See Patrick J. Gilpin, “Charles S. Johnson: Entrepreneur of the Harlem Renaissance,” 297, fn 27; Abby Johnson and Ronald Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 35.
36. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 218.
37. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, 168, 175.
39. Cullen to Locke, August 26, 1923, ALP, Box 164–22, Folder 36.
40. Locke to Cullen, undated, ALP, Box 164–22, Folder 36.
41. Brooklyn Eagle, February 10, 1924.
42. Walrond to Cullen, December 8, 1923, Eric Walrond Papers, ARC.
43. David Levering Lewis claims Johnson “was determined to exploit the fascination with Afro-America in order to launch an effort at racial breakthrough” (Vogue xx).
44. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 176.
45. Johnson to Locke, February 29 and March 4, 1924, ALP, Box 164–40, Folder 36.
46. Hutchinson, Harlem, 390.
47. Arna Bontemps, “The Awakening: A Memoir,” 10.
48. Hutchinson, Harlem, 389–93.
49. Nance, interview, 13.
50. Charles S. Johnson, “The New Generation,” Opportunity 2 (March 1924): 68.
51. Johnson to Locke, March 15, 1924, ALP, Box 164–40, Folder 36.
52. “The Debut of the Younger School of Negro Writers,” Opportunity (May 1924): 143–44.
53. Ibid.; Lewis, Vogue, 93–5.
54. Bontemps, “The Awakening,” 11.
56. New York Times Book Review, April 13, 1924.
57. Walrond to Locke, March 26, 1924, ALP, Box 164–40, Folder 36.
58. Robert Philipson, “The Harlem Renaissance as Postcolonial Phenomenon,” in African American Review 40 (Spring, 2006): 145.
59. “Debut of the Younger School,” 145.
60. The Messenger, July 1922: 477. Irma Watkins-Owens’s excellent analysis of the nativism of the “Garvey Must Go” campaign appears in Blood Relations, 112–35.
61. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” 4, 6, 11–12.
62. Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky,” 112.
63. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1936, 173.
64. Walrond to Locke, April 23, 1924, ALP, Box 164–91, Folder 38.
66. Charlotte Billet to Locke, May 16, 1924, ALP, Box 164–40, Folder 25.
67. No manuscript of Tiger Lilly survives.
68. In the same note in which he chastised Cullen for denying his homosexuality, Locke bristled, “Yes, I will plead guilty when the bitter time comes ‘to corrupting the youth’—but there they are—as Socrates would have said—my spiritual children—Jean Toomer—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Lewis Alexander, Richard Bruce—Donald Hayes—Albert Dunham—there they are—can a bad tree bring forth good fruit?” Undated letter, ALP, Box 164–22, Folder 36.
69. Locke and Kellogg excluded Fauset from the Harlem issue of Survey, and The New Negro only included her essay “The Gift of Laughter” at Du Bois’ insistence (Lewis, Du Bois, 162).
70. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Mrs. Fauset’s Confusion,” The New Republic (July 30, 1924): 274.
71. Cullen to Jackman, August 14, 1924, JWJ, MSS 7, Series 1.
72. Hughes to Cullen, undated, ARC.
73. Walrond to Locke, undated, ALP, Box 164–91, Folder 38.
74. Ibid., June 25, 1925.
75. Walrond to Van Vechten, February 16, 1925. Carl Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.
76. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, 1–2.
77. Columbia University transcript, GFP.
78. Joseph Freeman, publicity director at the American Civil Liberties Union and former assistant editor at The Liberator, corresponded with Walrond about this work, July 9 and August 20, 1924, JFC, Box 40, Folder 14.
79. Pagination refers to Parascandola, ed., Winds.
80. Allison Davis, “Our Negro ‘Intellectuals,’” Crisis 35 (August 1928): 269.
81. Countée Cullen, “The Dark Tower,” Opportunity 6 (March 1928): 90.
82. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Black Man’s Burden,” 233.
83. Gloria Hull, Color Sex and Poetry; A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance; George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940; Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color,” in Martin Duberman, ed., Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Dutton, 1991): 318–33; Gary Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); and James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).
84. George Chauncey, Gay New York, 12–13.
85. Charles Molesworth discusses this issue with sensitivity and insight in his 2012 biography of Cullen, And Bid Him Sing: a Biography of Countée Cullen, 4, 50; and in his article “Countée Cullen’s Reputation,” Transition 107 (2012): 67–77.
86. Cullen to Jackman, August 14, 1924, JWJ, MSS 7, Series 1.
87. Cullen to Locke, September 20, 1924, ALP, Box 164–22, Folder 37.
88. Ibid., October 27, 1924.
89. Ibid., October 31 and November 1, 1924.
90. Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance, 4.
92. Ibid., 133; Lewis, Vogue, xix.
93. Charles Johnson kept radicals off the Civic Club guest list, and the Harlem issue of Survey omitted prominent radicals such as Harrison, Briggs, and Randolph.
94. Vogel, Harlem Cabaret,133.
95. Hubert Harrison, “The Cabaret School of Negro Literature and Art,” 357.
96. Covarrubias had impressed Mexico City’s artists by age eighteen. His preferred form, caricature, was “a vital national tradition,” “a powerful forum for comment and expression,” and his work was syndicated “from Cuba to Buenos Aires.” Arriving in New York in 1923, Covarrubias took New York by storm and within a few years “knew everybody” in the arts and the major philanthropists. See Wendy Wick Reaves, Celebrity Caricature in America, 164, 170, 180.
97. Schwarz, Gay Voices, 141.
98. Kathleen Pfeiffer, introduction to Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, xviii.
101. Van Vechten did favors for friends that he did not want publicized, including securing a substantial loan for the Robesons in 1925. See correspondence with Marinoff, June 3 and July 2, 1925, CVV. Emily Bernard’s Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) includes illuminating accounts of these relationships.
102. Jackman to Van Vechten, February 14, 1925, Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.
103. Hughes to Van Vechten, May 17, 1925, Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.
104. Carl Van Vechten, The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922–1930, 58.
107. Arthur Pell to Agnes Jackson, July 14, 1965, LP.
108. Van Vechten, Splendid, 74–5.
109. Walrond to Van Vechten, February 16, 1925, Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.
110. Van Vechten, Splendid, 77.
111. Walrond to Van Vechten March 20, 1925, Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.
112. Van Vechten, Splendid, 79.
113. The proposed series became “Black Bohemia,” November 1925.
114. Walrond to Freeman, May 8, 1925, JFC.
115. Van Vechten to Marinoff, May 8, 1925, CVV, Box 36.
116. Walrond to Locke, June 25, 1925, ALP, Box 164–91, Folder 38; Walrond to Schomburg, November 13, 1924, Arthur Schomburg Papers, SCNYPL, Box 7, Folder 55.
117. Undated (1925), Aaron Douglas Papers, SCNYPL.
118. Opportunity, October 1926: 318.
119. Walrond to Freeman, May 8, 1925, JFC.
120. Van Vechten, Splendid, 83.
121. Correspondence of May 8 and May 13, 1925, JFC.
122. Van Vechten, Splendid, 83–8.
123. Walrond to Van Vechten, June 16, 1925, Carl Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.
124. Van Vechten, Splendid, 89.
125. Walrond to Locke, June 25, 1925, ALP, Box 164–91, Folder 38.
126. Ibid., July 25, 1925.
127. Van Vechten, Splendid, 89–93, 117, 133, 256. After the 1926 Opportunity dinner, Walrond and Van Vechten seem not to have met again until a chance encounter in Paris in 1929.
128. “An Open Letter,” Opportunity 27 (1949): 1.
129. Walrond’s responsibilities at Opportunity are difficult to ascertain. The business manager secured advertising accounts, wrote copy, and conducted the correspondence related to the journal’s production, circulation, and sponsored events. Walrond likely shared responsibility for dealing with the foundations funding the Department of Research and Investigations, under whose auspices Opportunity was published (Nancy J. Weiss, The National Urban League: 1910–1940, 156–57). On the obstacles to researching the Urban League’s history see Weiss, National Urban League, vii, and Touré F. Reed, Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910–1950, xiii.
130. Walrond to Locke, July 25, 1925, ALP, Box 164–91, Folder 38.
131. Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” 35–6.
5. TROPIC DEATH
1. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background, 240.
2. Mary White Ovington, “West India Tales,” The Chicago Defender (Jan. 1, 1927): A1.
3. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, 145.
4. “The Ebony Flute,” Opportunity, August 26, 1926: 260.
5. Awards Competition 1926, HFP.
6. Edward Kamau Braithwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, 10.
7. Carl A. Wade, “African American Aesthetics and the Short Fiction of Eric Walrond,” CLA Journal 42:4 (June 1999): 404.
9. The New York Times Book Review said Walrond “maintains an almost Olympian detachment toward human affairs.” “Eric Walrond’s Tales and Other New Works of Fiction,” New York Times Book Review (Oct. 17, 1926): 6.
10. Boni & Liveright Fall 1926 Catalogue, HFP.
11. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 367–72; Charles Egleston, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography 288: The House of Boni & Liveright, 1917–1933, 3–4.
12. Boni & Liveright Fall 1926 Catalogue, HFP.
13. Advertisement, New York Times Book Review, April 13, 1924. Claims about Tropic Death’s “objectivity” echoed through reviews and later scholarship. Hugh Gloster’s Negro Voices in American Fiction, written amidst the civil rights movement, exemplified this tendency: “Raising no issues and reaching no conclusions,” wrote Gloster, Walrond “is content to picture objectively the economic and social disorganization of Negro life in the region” (181).
14. Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal, 2.
15. As recently as 2005, David McCullough, author of the prizewinning history The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, attributed the American success to an exceptional “gift for improvisation,” calling the Canal “an extraordinary work of civilization” (Greene, Canal Builders, 3).
16. Scientific American drew visual analogies, equating the excavation’s volume with a ditch fifty-five feet wide and ten feet deep across the United States; The New York Times devoted a section of a 1912 issue to exquisitely detailed drawings, and popular histories appeared by the dozens.
17. My Trip Through the Panama Canal, Leonard Carpenter Collection, Digital Library of the Caribbean (http://dloc.com/results/?t=my trip through the panama canal).
18. See Rhonda Frederick, Colón Man a Come: Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration, 1–18.
19. Michelle Stephens, “Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death and the Discontents of American Modernity,” 175.
20. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 147.
21. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, 13.
22. Louis Parascandola, ed., “Winds Can Wake Up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader, 44–45.
23. Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” 35–36.
24. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, 4–5.
28. Art historian Richard J. Powell makes a similar claim about Walrond’s strategy of subversion from within the discourse of tropicality in “The Picturesque, Miss Nottage, and the Caribbean Sublime,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12 (February 2008): 164.
29. Jan Carew, “The Caribbean Writer and Exile,” The Journal of Black Studies 8 (June 1978): 464.
30. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 52. Art historian Peter Wood argues that Homer’s 1899 painting “deals in subtle and extended ways with slavery, U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean, southern race wars, and Jim Crow segregation.” Homer allegedly altered the painting to make it more affirmative, adding a rescue ship on the horizon after a poor initial reception. Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream, 91.
31. Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, 11.
32. Greene, Canal Builders, 130.
33. Michael Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981, 30–31.
34. Greene, Canal Builders, 132.
35. John Bassett includes an extensive, though not comprehensive, list of reviews of Tropic Death in Harlem in Review: Critical Reactions to Black American Writers, 1917–1939 (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1992): 65–67.
36. Langston Hughes, “Marl Dust and West Indian Sun,” New York Herald Tribune (Dec 5, 1926): 9; Robert Herrick, “Review of Tropic Death,” The New Republic (November 10, 1926): 332; “Eric Walrond’s Tales,” 6; Joel A. Rogers, “Book Reviews,” Pittsburgh Courier (March 5, 1927): 8.
37. “Eric Walrond’s Tales,” 6; Devere Allen, “Living Stories of Tropic Death,” The World Tomorrow (November 1926); Herrick, “Review of Tropic Death,” 332; Hughes, “Marl Dust,” 9; V. F. Calverton, “Ground Swells in Fiction,” Survey 57 (November 1, 1926): 160; Mary White Ovington, “West India Tales,” The Chicago Defender (Jan. 1, 1927): A1.
38. “Five Books,” Crisis (January 1927): 152.
39. Benjamin Brawley, “The Negro Literary Renaissance,” Southern Workman 56 (April 1927): 179.
41. Hughes, “Marl Dust,” 6.
42. Rogers, “Book Reviews,” Pittsburgh Courier (March 5, 1927): 8.
44. The New Yorker (December 4, 1926): 58–59.
45. “Eric Walrond’s Tales,” 6; Herrick, “Review,” 332; Egleston, Dictionary, 406; Devere Allen, “Living Stories of Tropic Death.”
46. Waldo Frank, “In Our Language,” Opportunity (Nov. 1926): 352.
48. Walrond to Freeman, May 8, 1925, JFC.
49. Hughes, “Marl Dust,” 6.
6. A PERSON OF DISTINCTION (1926–1929)
1. Charles Johnson, “Editorials,” Opportunity 5 (January 1927): 3; Dewey R. Jones, “The Bookshelf,” Chicago Defender (September 17, 1927): A1; Robert Herrick, “Review of Tropic Death,” The New Republic (November 10, 1926): 332.
2. “Contest Awards,” Opportunity 3 (May 1925): 142–43. Documents on literary awards appear in Cary Wintz, ed., The Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940, Vol. I: The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance.
3. Nancy J. Weiss, The National Urban League: 1910–1940, 216–33.
4. Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833, 27.
5. “Some Economic Aspects of Negro Migrations,” Opportunity 5 (Oct. 1927): 297. Johnson editorialized on West Indians in November 1924, and Domingo wrote that year about the restrictive impact of the Johnson-Reed Act on the Caribbean. But Opportunity’s national orientation is evident.
6. Exceptions included occasional articles by Alain Locke and Albert Barnes on African art and a testy exchange between Locke and René Maran about French colonialism.
7. Charles S. Johnson, “Editorials,” Opportunity 4 (November 1926): 334.
8. Walrond to Schomburg, September 22, 1926, Arthur Schomburg Papers, SCNYPL, Box 7, Folder 55.
9. Lucius J. M. Malmin, “A Caribbean Fact and Fancy,” Opportunity (Nov. 1926): 343.
10. Casper Holstein, “The Virgin Islands: Past and Present,” Opportunity (Nov. 1926): 345.
11. W. A. Domingo, “The West Indies,” Opportunity (Nov. 1926): 341.
12. Ethelred Brown and Eugene Kinckle Jones, “West Indian-American Relations: A Symposium,” Opportunity (Nov. 1926): 355.
13. Kenneth Warren, “Appeals for (Mis-)Recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” 404.
14. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, 5.
15. Charles S. Johnson, “Editorials,” Opportunity 4 (November 1926): 337.
16. Walrond to Cullen, October 20, 1925, Countee Cullen Papers, ARC.
17. Ibid., October 26, 1925.
18. Ibid., November 19, 1925.
19. Cullen to Locke, May 27, November 19, and December 5, 1925, ALP, Box 164–22.
20. Walrond to Cullen, November 23, 1925, Countee Cullen Papers, ARC.
21. Baer to Locke, December 19, 1925, ALP, Box 164–10.
22. Walrond to Schomburg, December 24, 1925, Arthur Schomburg Papers, SCNYPL.
23. Walrond to McKay, February 14, 1927, Claude McKay Collection, Series I, JWJ.
24. Ibid., June 7 and June 28, 1927.
25. McKay to Cunard, September 18, 1932, Nancy Cunard Papers, HRHRC.
27. Undated correspondence, ALP, Box 164–91, Folder 38.
28. Kathleen Currie, “Interviews with Marvel Jackson Cooke,” 45–46.
29. Ibid., 47. In addition to Kathleen Currie’s interview, biographical information appears in Richard Pearson, “Marvel Cooke Dies at 99,” Washington Post, December 2, 2000: B7; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement,76–77; and Lashawn Harris, “Marvel Cooke: Investigative Journalist, Communist, and Black Radical Subject,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 6 (2012): 91–126.
34. When their essay appeared in 1935 “the modern concept of feminism was still a foreign concept to most Americans, black and white,” historian Barbara Ransby observes, “Yet the black feminist notion of intersecting systems of oppression as the cornerstone of black women’s collective experience was an observable reality, and in their article [Jackson] Cooke and Baker came close to articulating it as a theory” (Ella Baker, 77).
37. Scholarship on Gurdjieff’s influence in Harlem has been reductive, compounding the lack of clarity about Walrond’s involvement. Jon Woodson’s To Make a New Race documents the participation of New Negro artists and writers, but its reach exceeds its grasp. For a discussion of Gurdjieff and Harlem that avoids either dismissing him or credulously identifying his influence everywhere, see George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, 183–86.
38. Jon Woodson, To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance, 6–7.
39. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 243.
40. Hutchinson, In Search, 185.
41. Douglas to Alta Sawyer, undated, Aaron Douglas Papers, Box 1, Folder 3, SCNYPL.
42. Hutchinson, In Search, 183.
43. Jon Woodson, To Make a New Race, 39.
46. From “The Negro Emergent,” an unpublished manuscript that “was the basis of, or a version of” the talk Toomer gave at the 135th Street library (Hutchinson, In Search, 541, fn 26).
47. Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 145.
48. Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks,” 51.
49. Its first year in print, Cane sold 565 copies, then 1,200–1,500 copies per year immediately thereafter. Tropic Death sold 2,000–2,500 copies per year its first few years in print. W.W. Norton Papers, Series III, Butler Library, Columbia University. In Opportunity, Cullen reported in January 1927 that Tropic Death was the fourth most requested book at the Harlem branch.
50. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 189.
51. “Survey of the Month,” Opportunity 5 (January 1927): 30–31.
52. Wallace Thurman, “Negro Artists and the Negro,” 37.
53. Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson, 74.
54. “Survey of the Month,” Opportunity 5 (February 1927): 61.
55. “Side Lights on Society,” New York Amsterdam News (October 27, 1926): 4.
57. Hutchinson, In Search, 262.
58. Amy H. Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance, 36.
59. “Harlemites Open New Night Club,” New York Amsterdam News (October 12, 1927): 7.
60. Executive Secretary Eugene Kinckle Jones enumerated the business manager’s responsibilities: “To increase the circulation and the advertisements of the magazine, to make contacts with the younger Negro writers and to make contacts with literary contributors of the past and to reach new persons.” Executive Secretary Report, November 19, 1928, Part I, Box A1, NUL. No personnel file on Walrond survives in the Urban League’s records.
61. Walrond to Johnson, September 23, 1925, JWJ, Series I, Box 22, Folder 522.
62. Johnson to Locke, January 27, 1925, ALP, Box 164–40.
63. Memo from Haynes, Dec. 28, 1925, HFP, Box 51.
64. Walrond to Olyve Jeter, August 11, 1926, HFP, Box 51.
65. Spingarn to Haynes, Oct 21, 1926, HFP, Box 51.
66. Recommendations from Friede, Liveright, and Hergesheimer, HFP, Box 51.
67. Friede to Walrond, January 27, 1927, LP.
68. Johnson to Locke, February 1, 1927, ALP, Box 164–40.
69. Floyd Calvin, “Eric D. Walrond Leaves ‘Opportunity’ to Devote Entire Time to Writing,” Pittsburgh Courier (February 12, 1927): 2.
70. “Eric Walrond,” Opportunity 5 (March 1927): 67.
71. Harmon Foundation Papers (HFP).
76. Walrond to Haynes, January 11, 1928, HFP, Box 51.
77. Gloria Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, 134, 175.
78. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 214.
79. Letters from Zona Gale and Professor O’Shea of the University of Wisconsin, GF.
80. Olyve Jeter to Walrond, January 30, 1928, HFP.
81. Walrond telegram to Haynes, January 31, 1928, HFP.
82. Walrond to Haynes, February 16, 1928, HFP.
83. Arthur to Haynes, February 14, 1928, HFP.
84. Walrond to Haynes, February 16, 1928, HFP.
85. Walrond to Moe, December 17, 1927, GFP.
86. Gwendolyn Bennett, “The Ebony Flute,” Opportunity 5 (September 1927): 277.
87. Walrond to Moe, December 17, 1927, GFP.
88. These were the writer Walter White; Isaac Fisher, Fisk University journalism instructor; and Nicholas Ballanta, a composer and musicologist from Sierra Leone.
89. As abstemious as he was ambitious, Moe was a Rhodes Scholar and military veteran who at age thirty had passed the bar in England and was lecturing at Oxford when he was tapped to head the Foundation in New York.
90. G. Thomas Tanselle, “Chronology,” 30.
91. Boni & Liveright catalogue, Fall 1927, LP: 22.
92. Eric Walrond File, Guggenheim Foundation Papers (GFP).
98. William Seabrook, Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940): 223–24. His memoirs were Asylum (1935) and No Hiding Place (1942).
99. Eric Walrond File, Guggenheim Foundation Papers (GFP).
102. Gwendolyn Bennett, “Ebony Flute,” Opportunity 5 (November, 1927): 340.
103. The Harmon Award and Zona Gale Scholarship likely redounded to Walrond’s credit in the eyes of the Guggenheim selection committee, as Moe’s correspondence with Walrond in February 1928 indicates his keen interest in these developments.
104. Eric Walrond File, Guggenheim Foundation Papers (GFP).
105. Reuben Stiehm, Wisconsin General Hospital, to Moe, April 3, 1928, GFP.
106. The creative arts appointees in 1928 included three poets, four painters, a sculptor, two playwrights, and two composers. Walrond was the only one for whom France was not the primary destination.
7. THE CARIBBEAN AND FRANCE (1928–1931)
1. Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, 51.
2. Chicago Defender, May 12, 1928: 1.
3. “Guggenheim Foundation Awards,” The Times [London], March 21, 1928: 15.
4. Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1877–1934, 377.
5. Elizabeth Lay Green, The Negro in Contemporary American Literature, 51.
6. “Harlem” was a sub-entry within the general entry “The American Negro.”
7. Walter Mignolo, who calls coloniality the “hidden face of modernity and its very condition of possibility,” argues that “most stories of modernity have been told from the perspective of modernity itself, including, of course, those told by its internal critics,” and as a result only the “border thinking” of those marginalized or exploited by the hegemonic projects of globalization constitute a “critical cosmopolitanism” that challenges existing inequalities. See “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12:3 (2000): 721–45; and Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, 49–89.
8. Letter to Miss Gluck, March 14, 1928, W. W. Norton Papers.
9. Gwendolyn Bennett, “The Ebony Flute,” Opportunity 6 (February 1928): 56.
10. Charles Egleston, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography 288: The House of Boni & Liveright, 1917–1933, 16.
11. Expenses for The Big Ditch, which totaled $1,592.45, were enumerated in a memo to Friede, September 17, 1928, three days before Walrond sailed for Panama. W. W. Norton Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University. Messner and Liveright correspondence, July 27 and August 9, 1928, Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania.
12. It is unclear why Friede did not agree to the proposed terms. No mention of the matter appears in his memoir, The Mechanical Angel, nor do the Liveright Corporation Papers contain documentation. What is clear is that Friede was an adept violator of all sorts of commitments; he had been expelled from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and divorced five of the six women he married. Preface to the Donald Friede Papers, Library of Congress.
13. Eric Walrond file, GFP.
14. John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama, 40–42.
15. Walrond to Moe, April 2, 1929, GFP. United Fruit, a massive Boston-based company, had a long, checkered history in the region. Among the disgruntled West Indian workers for “el pulpo” (the octopus), as locals called United Fruit, was a young Marcus Garvey (Colin Grant, Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, 26–30).
16. Walter LaFaber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective, 76–77.
17. Eric Walrond File, GFP.
18. Walrond to Moe, April 2, 1929, GFP.
19. Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 139.
20. Walrond may not have met Bellegarde in New York in 1927, but if not there or in Port-au-Prince the following year, they likely met in Paris in 1930, when Bellegarde wrote about Haiti’s occupation in La Dépêche africaine.
21. The quotation from Harrison is from “Hands Across the Sea,” Negro World (September 10, 1921). Harrison’s critiques of Haiti’s occupation are reprinted in Jeffrey B. Perry, ed., A Hubert Harrison Reader, 234–39.
22. Walrond to Moe, April 2, 1929, GFP.
23. Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean, 265.
25. Ibid., January 22, 1929.
26. Moe to Walrond, March 8, 1929, GFP.
27. Adolph Gereau, “With Eric Waldron [sic] at the Eureka,” The Emancipator 8 (April 3, 1929): 1; “Eric Waldron [sic] Seeks Material In Islands,” Chicago Defender (May 5, 1929): A1.
28. Carl A. Wade, “A Forgotten Forum: The Forum Quarterly and the Development of West Indian Literature,” Caribbean Quarterly 50 (2004): 64.
30. “Negro Progress Convention: Reception of Rev. F. G. Snelson,” Daily Argosy (Georgetown), July 30, 1929.
31. Walrond sent two letters from “Off St. Kitts, British West Indies,” to Moe dated April 2, 1929, GFP.
32. “I can’t remember what the thing was,” Ethel Ray Nance said years later, “I can’t imagine Eric ever falling down on an assignment” (Nance, interview, 14).
33. Thurman to Hughes, undated, reprinted in Cary Wintz, ed., The Critics and the Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940, 345.
34. Boni & Liveright Fall 1928 Catalogue, 22, LP.
35. By exterior, Mignolo does “not mean something lying untouched beyond capitalism and modernity, but the outside that is required by the inside. Thus, exteriority is indeed the borderland seen from the perspective of those ‘to be included,’ as they have no other option” (“Many Faces” 724).
36. William Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars, 71–73.
37. Joel A. Rogers, “Brightest Side of My Trip,” New York Amsterdam News (October 5, 1927): 14.
38. Diary entry, June 28, 1925, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers, SCNYPL.
39. Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980, 76. Cullen’s poem “To France” illustrates his association of the country and the language with the sensation of freedom.
40. Quote in Paule Marshall, Triangular Road: A Memoir, 27.
41. Walrond to Moe, June 30, 1929, GFP.
42. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 145.
44. On heightened tensions due to white American visitors, including a Klan-initiated campaign to “protect” white women from black men, see Shack, Harlem, 68–71.
45. Wambly Bald, On the Left Bank 1929–1933, 4.
46. Walrond to Moe, August 26, 1929, return address 4 Rue du Parc Montsouris, GFP. However, Cullen’s biographer, Charles Molesworth, confirmed that Cullen made no mention of housing Walrond in Paris. E-mail communication with the author, June 29, 2012.
48. Countée Cullen, “Countée Cullen in England,” The Crisis (August 1929): 270.
50. Countée Cullen, “The Dark Tower,” Opportunity 5 (September 1928): 4.
51. Theresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters & Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934, 84.
52. Charles Molesworth, And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen, 169.
53. Cullen, “Dark Tower,” (September 1928): 4.
54. Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 141.
55. Cullen, “The Dark Tower,” (September 1928): 4.
56. Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 81, 141.
57. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light, 97–99.
58. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, 119–24, 129; Stovall, Paris Noir, 107.
59. Mme. de Lesseps’ handwritten translation of “the Panama Affair,” WFP.
60. André Levinson, “De Harlem à la Cannebiere,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires (September 14, 1929).
61. See Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962, 167–203; Edwards, Diaspora, 187–240; Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Disapora, 207–247; Heather Hathaway, Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall, 63–74.
62. “Why don’t you send us something?” wrote Elmer Carter, the new editor of Opportunity, “I am mighty glad to hear from you, since I did not know where you were except that I heard that you were in Europe.” July 18, 1930, SGD, Series III, Box 15.7.
63. This was his sobriquet in the Lectures du Soir interview, which translates roughly as “a first-class black writer.”
64. Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 320. Walrond’s reference to “my Paris agent” appears in a January 9, 1931, letter to Graham.
65. Debora Bone translated the essay into English. The author gratefully acknowledges Dorothy Bone and Louis Parascandola for access to the translation.
66. Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, 54.
67. Scrapbook, SGD, Box 1, Folder 1.8.
68. Shirley Graham, Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World, 211.
69. “People in Books,” SGD, Box 1, Folder 1.1.
70. Graham, Robeson, 209–10.
71. Walrond to Graham, November 1, 1930, SGD, Series III, Box 15.7.
72. Postcard from Graham to her brother, September 21, 1930, SGD, Series III, Box 11.
73. Graham, Robeson, 210.
74. Henry Crowder, As Wonderful As All That? Henry Crowder’s Memoir of His Affair with Nancy Cunard, 1928–1935, 132.
75. George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, 388.
76. William Seabrook, Asylum, 33.
77. Hutchinson, In Search, 383.
78. William Seabrook, No Hiding Place: An Autobiography, 322.
79. Crowder, As Wonderful, 132.
80. Walrond to Graham, November 1, 1930, SGD, Series III, Box 15.7.
81. SGD, Series III, Box 15.7, Folder 15.16. As Gerald Horne writes, “She was barely scraping by” (54).
82. N. S. Russell to Graham, November 18, 1930, SGD, Series III, Box 15.7.
83. Walrond to Graham, November 1, 1930, SGD, Series III, Box 15.7. It is possible to read the postscript to suggest profound manipulation rather than profound loneliness.
84. Ibid., January 27, 1931.
85. Ibid., November 29, 1930.
86. Ibid., March 22, 1931.
88. Ibid., January 27, 1931.
89. Ibid., January 27, 1931, and February 18, 1931.
90. Ibid., March 9, 1931.
91. Ibid., November 29, 1930, January 9, 1931, and January 27, 1931.
92. Ibid., November 29, 1930.
93. Ibid., February 18, 1931.
95. Ibid., January 27, 1931.
96. Ibid., January 9, 1931.
97. Ibid., November 1, 1930.
99. Ibid., March 9, 1931.
100. Autobiographical sketch, SGD, Series III, Box 1, Folder 1.1.
101. Walrond to Graham, April 22, 1931, SGD, Series III, Box 15.7.
103. Edna Worthley Underwood, “West Indian Literature: Some Negro Poets of Panama,” West Indian Review [Kingston], March 1936: 67. Louis Parascandola consulted the American Hospital administration but was informed that records were destroyed after thirty years. “It may well have been psychological turmoil exacerbated by alcoholism,” Parascandola surmised (Hutchinson, In Search, xxvii).
104. New York Amsterdam News, September 9, 1931.
105. “Mr. Walrond cited the benefits he received while a member of the Writers’ Guild” (“Walrond Praises Literary Groups at Club’s Meeting,” The New York Amsterdam News, October 28, 1931: 15).
106. Correspondence between Moe and Horace Hitchcock, September, 1931, GFP.
107. Walrond to Graham, October 19, 1931, SGD, Series III, Box 15.7.
108. Kathleen Currie, “Interviews with Marvel Jackson Cooke,” 49.
109. Wallace Thurman, “This Negro Literary Renaissance,” 240.
110. Nance, interview, 15.
8. LONDON I (1931–1939)
1. “Walrond, Harmon Winner, Travels with Troupe,” The Baltimore Afro-American, April 27, 1935.
2. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 233.
4. “Bob Williams in London,” Baltimore Afro-American (June 23, 1934): 9.
5. Carol Polsgrove, Ending British Rule in Africa, ix.
6. Peter Blackman, “Is There a West Indian Literature?” Life and Letters [London] 59 (November 1948): 101.
7. Polsgrove, British Rule, xi–xv; Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957, 7–8.
8. Polsgrove, British Rule, 54.
9. “The writer who ran away” was the title of Kenneth Ramchand’s essay about Walrond in Savacou in 1970. The characterization of Walrond as silent after 1929 appears in Lewis, Vogue, 233.
10. Pagination for “Tai Sing” and “Inciting to Riot” refers to Louis Parascandola and Carl A. Wade, eds., In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond.
11. Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain, 154–59.
12. Delia Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson, 49–50.
13. Tony Martin, Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan-Africanist, Feminist, and Marcus Garvey Wife No. 1, 137.
14. March 19, 1935: 11. Another article two days earlier was entitled “Calypsoes in London Revue.” The author thanks John Cowley and Howard Rye for information about the Harlem Nightbirds.
15. “Walrond, Harmon Winner, Travels with Troupe,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 27, 1935.
16. “White Man, What Now?” Spectator (April 5, 1935): 562–63. Pagination refers to Louis Parascandola, ed., “Winds Can Wake Up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader.
17. Polsgrove, British Rule, 18.
18. Von Eschen, Race, 16.
19. Minkah Makalani, “An International African Opinion: Amy Ashwood Garvey and C. L. R. James in Black Radical London,” 84–89.
20. On Walrond’s presence at Holtby’s with Marson and others, see Delia Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson, 81–92.
21. Robert Hill, ed., The Black Man: A Monthly Journal of Negro Thought and Opinion, 1933–1939, 3.
22. Ibid., 5; Colin Grant, Negro With a Hat: the Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, 429, 438.
24. “The American Negroes are the best organized and the most conscious of all the Negroes in the world,” Garvey wrote in 1935 (Robert Hill, Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, 156).
26. Pagination refers to Parascandola, ed., Winds.
27. Bill Schwarz, introduction to West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, 8.
29. Pagination refers to Parascandola, ed., Winds.
30. Composed in 1935, “Truckin’” was recorded by Fats Waller and Duke Ellington.
31. Fay M. Jackson, “Coronation in Review: Truckin’ at Aggrey,” California Eagle (May 28, 1937): 1.
32. The conflict between Mosley’s “Black Shirts” and the anti-Fascists came to a head during Walrond’s tenure at The Black Man in 1936. When Mosely announced a march through London’s East End (home to many Jews), the Communist Party, Jewish advocacy groups, and other activists came out 100,000 strong to block the streets. A police force of 6,000 met them, beating and harassing demonstrators in an effort to secure access for the Fascists, a confrontation known as the Battle of Cable Street.
33. No documentation survives of Walrond’s relationship with Padmore, but a 1959 letter to Moe indicates that he attended Padmore’s funeral in London and considered him a friend.
34. Grant, Negro With a Hat, 438.
35. Linking the anticolonial struggle to the overthrow of capitalism and envisioning Africa as the critical site of struggle, Walrond echoed C. L. R. James, whose encounters with Africans in 1930s London dramatically revised his view of a “backward” Africa and politically advanced Caribbean (Makalani, “An International African Opinion,” 83–95).
36. Marcus Garvey, “The Removal!” Black Man (August 1935): 3.
37. Grant, Negro With a Hat, 440–43.
39. Benjamin Brawley, The Negro Genius, 253.
40. Walrond corresponded with Orwell in 1944, when Orwell was literary editor for The Tribune. He wished to review Charles Johnson’s book Patterns of Negro Segregation. He later sent Orwell a sketch about the collaboration between the British police and the U.S. military police. Although Orwell “read it with interest and with some surprise,” he passed it on to “the political section of the paper, to which I think it belongs,” adding “I rather doubt their using it, because of our chronic shortage of space.” Correspondence of October 17, 19, 21, and 23, and November 28, 1944, WFP.
41. Correspondence of July 14 and August 8, 1939, WFP.
42. “Law Notices,” The Times [London] (September 14, 1938): 4; “News in Brief,” The Times [London] (September 22, 1938): 7; “Coloured Men’s Quarrel: A Struggle at West Kensington,” Westminster and Pimlico News (September 9, 1938): 6.
43. Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, 129.
44. Grant, Negro With a Hat, 444–45; Taylor, Veiled Garvey, 128–134.
45. Taylor, Veiled Garvey, 129.
46. Johnson to Nance, May 4, 1939, ERN.
47. Ibid., July 12, 1939.
48. Ibid., September 2, 1939.
49. Ibid., January 3, 1940.
50. Ibid., September 2, 5, and 28, 1939.
51. Ibid., September 2, 1939.
9. BRADFORD-ON-AVON (1939–1952)
1. In addition to the author’s observations in 2009, this chapter draws on Harold Fassnidge and Roger Jones, Bradford-on-Avon: Past and Present, 2nd edition (Jersey, UK: Ex Libris, 2007); and Margaret Dobson, Bradford Voices: A Study of Bradford on Avon Through the Twentieth Century.
2. Dobson, Bradford Voices, 101–103.
3. Advertisements in The Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser, Wiltshire-Swindon History Centre.
4. Dobson, Bradford Voices, 115–17.
5. Gerald Bodman, interviewed by the author, Atworth-near-Melksham, March 17, 2009. Subsequent quotations are from the same interview.
6. John Cottle, interviewed by the author, Bradford-on-Avon, March 14, 2009. Subsequent quotations are from the same interview.
7. Mary Lane, interviewed by the author, Trowbridge, March 14, 2009. Subsequent quotations are from the same interview.
8. Ruth Walrond to Moe, May 31, 1940, GFP.
9. Walrond to Nance, September 4, 1939, ERN.
10. Nance to Johnson, September 28, 1939, ERN.
11. Johnson to Nance, January 3, 1940, ERN.
12. Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1877–1934, 308.
13. Walrond to Moe, June 20, 1940, GFP.
14. “Eric Waldron [sic], Novelist, Lost in German Air Raid,” Chicago Defender (April 29, 1944): 1.
15. See Louis Parascandola and Carl A. Wade, eds., In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond, lvii. Walrond’s neighbor Mary Lane told the author, “During the war, the police came once and asked, did I know anything about him. Which I didn’t, really; I couldn’t say a lot about the man.”
16. “The Hanging in England That People Hated,” New York Amsterdam News, July 29, 1944: 6; “English Woman Held for ‘Delinquency’ of Child,” New York Amsterdam News, August 19, 1944: 1.
17. Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957, 42.
19. Walrond’s first article was the only one explicitly attributed to him, but the journal’s contents leave little doubt about which contributions were his.
20. Mission statement, The Monthly Summary 1:1 (August 1943); Marybeth Gasman and Patrick J. Gilpin, Charles S. Johnson: Leadership Beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow, 176–78.
21. “British Colonial Policy in Africa,” The Monthly Summary, February, 1945: 198–200; “The Doctrine of States Rights in Africa,” The Monthly Summary, November, 1945: 113–115.
22. Ibid., November, 1946: 99.
23. Dobson, Bradford Voices, 136.
25. The fourth account, a sketch entitled “Strange Incident,” waited several years to see print.
26. Avon Rubber Company spokesperson Fiona Stewart, e-mail message to author, May 29, 2009.
27. Dobson, Bradford Voices, 130.
28. Walrond to Bennett, May 22, 1946, Gwendolyn Bennett Papers, SCNYPL.
29. Charles Nichols, ed., The Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters, 228.
30. Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972, 4.
31. Muhammad Anwar, “Immigration,” 219.
32. Delia Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson, 177. Two 1948 issues of Life and Letters included writing by Victor Reid, Peter Blackman, George Lamming, Clifford Sealy, Vivian Virtue, Edgar Mittelholzer, and Roger Mais.
33. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, 106.
34. Pagination refers to Louis Parascandola, ed., “Winds Can Wake Up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader.
35. Richard Allsopp’s Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage defines poor-great as “Poor but haughty in appearance or conduct; too proud to be seen or known to accept charity or help that is really needed; poor and snobbish” (448). The Jamaican variant is poor-show-great.
37. As it happens, mental illness among “Negro” men was for the first time theorized with force and eloquence at that very moment in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). V. S. Naipaul, a fledgling writer in London, descended this same year into suicidal ideation, “a great depression verging on madness.” Neither his Oxford degree nor his renunciation of his Caribbean background prevented English landladies from disdaining his brown skin, and Naipaul said of 1952, “I was mentally disturbed. I was very, very disturbed, very melancholy, I had a degree of clinical depression” (Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, 94, 96). Finally, the same month Walrond checked into Roundway Hospital, Guyanese writer Edgar Mittelholzer received a Guggenheim Fellowship taking him from the West Indies to Montreal, but he soon became unhinged and alcoholic, returning to Barbados and later taking his own life in Surrey, England.
10. ROUNDWAY HOSPITAL AND THE SECOND BATTLE (1952–1957)
1. Bath and Wilts Chronicle and Herald, March 29, 1952: 1.
2. Philip Steele, Down Pan’s Lane: The History of Roundway Hospital, 3.
4. Correspondence of December 1956 and March and April 1957, Eric and Jessica Huntley Collection, London Metropolitan Archives.
5. Correspondence between Walrond and Moe, September 24, October 9 and 30, 1953, GFP.
6. Ibid., August 30, 1954.
7. From “The Known, the Uncertain,” originally published in French in Le Discours Antillais (Paris: Les Editions de Seuils, 1981). In J. Michael Dash’s translation (1989), he prefers the terms “diversion” and “reversion,” but I have used a modified translation from Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, 24.
8. Eleven of the thirteen stories are reprinted in Louis Parascandola and Carl A. Wade, eds., In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond.
9. Bessie down (or bésé-dong) is a song accompanying a Caribbean ring-game (Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, 95).
10. On the context in which De Lesseps made this statement see Matthew Parker, Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal, 67.
11. Parker, Panama Fever, 154.
12. Panamanian novelist Gil Blas Tejeira portrayed Prestán sympathetically in Pueblos Perdidos (1962), a fictionalized account of the civil war, honoring “the fundamental historical facts.” Tejeira’s Prestán was “a passionate man representing Colón’s Black community who was hated by foreign Whites for his skin color and by Colombian conservatives for his rebellion” (John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama, 213). Similarly, historian Matthew Parker argues that Prestán probably did not commit the crime for which he was hanged, the arson that destroyed much of Colón (Panama Fever, 154). It is hard to imagine Walrond examining the record and arriving at a divergent interpretation.
13. John Leech, Inside-Out: The View from the Asylum, 83.
16. Reginald Turner to Robert Bone, September 15, 1987. The author thanks Louis Parascandola for access to the letter.
17. Cunard to Walrond, undated 1954, WFP.
18. Ibid., October 4, 1954.
19. Ibid., December 2, 1954.
20. Ibid., January 7, 1956.
21. Walrond to Jackman, September 24 and November 8, 1954, CJMC.
22. Cunard to Marx, April 4, 1957, WFP.
23. Marx to Walrond, May 6, 1957, HFC.
24. Walrond to Marx, May 8, 1957, HFC.
25. Walrond to Jackman, September 23, 1957, CJMC.
26. Walrond to Marx, May 8, 1957, HFC.
27. Marx to Walrond, May 10, 1957, HFC.
28. Walrond to Marx, May 20, 1957, HFC.
11. LONDON II (1957–1966)
1. Walrond to Cunard, April 7, 1958, Nancy Cunard Papers, HRHRC.
2. The principal activity of the Company of Nine, which Marx codirected with Rumer Godden and James Haynes-Dixon, had been “literary lunches” at Foyle’s Bookstore in Charing Cross.
3. Walrond to Marx, July 5, 1957, HFC.
8. Marx to Walrond, June 7, 1957, HFC.
10. Walrond to Marx, June 28, 1957, HFC.
11. The title was taken from a 1908 poetry collection by James Weldon Johnson.
12. Walrond to Marx, July 29, 1957, HFC.
13. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, 374–75.
14. Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain, xxii.
15. Correspondence between Walrond and Erica Marx of July 25, August 1, August 22, August 25, and September 4, 1957, HFC. Walrond wrote Marx on August 27 to say that he would “apply for my release” on the 29th. He was officially discharged one week later.
16. Walrond to Marx, October 9, 1957, HFC.
17. Ibid., September 2, 1957.
18. Marx to Walrond, November 4, 1957, HFC.
19. Ibid., October 9, 1957.
20. Ibid., September 9, 1957.
21. Walrond to Marx, October 9, 1957, HFC.
22. Ibid., December 14, 1957.
23. Ibid., November 19, 1957.
24. Ibid., December 4, 1957, HFC.
25. Ibid., December 14, 1957.
26. Walrond to Jackman, April 2, 1958, CJMC.
27. Labour Exchanges were job centers, established at the turn of the century to link employers to workers through a centralized clearinghouse as an alternative to individual efforts.
28. Hinds, Illusion, 60–74.
29. Gordon Heath, Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate, 87.
30. RPP. No correspondence between Pool and Walrond has survived. After “Black and Unknown Bards,” Pool published Beyond the Blues: New Poems by American Negroes with Marx’s Hand and Flower Press.
31. “Black Verse,” Sunday Times, September 7, 1958; “Poetic Enterprise,” Manchester Guardian, September 9, 1958. RPP.
32. Books and Bookmen, October, 1958. RPP.
33. “A Negro Triumph,” The Daily Worker, October 7, 1958. RPP.
34. Elizabeth Frank, “TV Should Take Up This Show,” News Chronicle, October 6, 1958. RPP.
35. “A Negro Triumph,” Daily Worker, October 9, 1958. RPP.
36. Books and Bookmen, November 1958. RPP.
37. “Negro Poetry,” Stage, October 9, 1958. RPP.
38. Frank, “TV Should Take Up This Show.”
39. “A Negro Triumph,” Daily Worker, October 9, 1958. RPP.
40. The poets began with Frances E. W. Harper, included Dunbar, McKay, Hughes, Bennett, and Cullen, and concluded with Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Walker.
41. Bill Schwarz, “Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette: Reflections on the Emergence of Post-Colonial Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 14:3 (2003): 264–85.
42. Fryer, Staying Power, 382; Muhammad Anwar, “Immigration,” 219.
43. Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972, 104.
44. George Lamming, telephone conversation with the author, November 18, 2009.
45. Walrond to Spingarn, April 1959, WFP.
46. Walrond to Jackman, December 21, 1958, CJMC.
47. Cunard to Walrond, December 18, 1958, WFP.
48. Ibid., January 6 and January 28, 1959.
49. Ibid., April 25, 1959.
50. Lois Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, 322–42.
51. Walrond to Jackman, May 4, 1959, CJMC. Incontro con L’Arte Africana (1959), by Boris de Rachelwitz, was translated into English in 1966.
52. Walrond to Moe, June 11, 1960. GFP.
53. The Farringdon exchange was near the office, and Walrond had its contact information in his last address book, WFP.
55. Tony Martin, Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan-Africanist, Feminist, and Marcus Garvey Wife No. 1, 279–80. Others claim that Sylvia Pankhurst wrote the introduction. See Ula Y. Taylor, “Street Strollers: Grounding the Theory of Black Women Intellectuals,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 30.2 (2006): 153–71. Liberia: Land of Promise was a 32-page pamphlet published by the Liberian Information Service.
56. Bontemps to Pell, September 14, 1965, LP.
57. Nance, interview, 14.
58. Pell to Walrond, December 28, 1965, LP.
59. Walrond to Pell, March 3, 1966, LP.
60. Pell to Walrond, March 7, 1966, LP. Walrond’s editorial emendations appear on a copy of Tropic Death currently in the LP. Although he made some corrections to errors introduced in the original, most of Walrond’s emendations were stylistic, particularly aimed to soften racial language that may have sounded offensive in the 1960s. Neither the 1972 Collier Books reprint nor the 2013 reissue from Liveright/Norton incorporated these emendations.
61. Walrond to Pell, March 11, 1966, LP.
62. Ibid., March 21, 1966.
63. Ibid., April 18, 1966.
64. Pell to Walrond, April 20, 1966, LP.
65. Walrond’s death certificate cites the hospital and cause of death, “recurrent coronary thrombosis.” The author wishes to thank Louis Parascandola for providing a copy.
66. Pell’s suggestion that Collier commission an introduction from Bontemps was not followed, much to the dismay of Walrond’s daughters. Adding insult to injury, Collier’s edition included errors in Walrond’s birthplace and the year of his death.
67. Jack Conroy, “Memories of Arna Bontemps: Friend and Collaborator,” American Libraries (December 1974): 604.
68. Walrond to Hughes, undated [1965], Langston Hughes Papers, Series I, Box 167, JWJ.
69. Bontemps to Hughes, September 1, 1966 (Nichols 474).
POSTSCRIPT
1. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, xxvi.
3. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Transatlantic Slave Route, 17.