Introduction
1. Qtd. in Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Printed for the editor, 1836), 2:237. In The Federalist number 54, Hamilton or James Madison expands upon the necessity to strike a balance between treating slaves as either property or persons. Although Hamilton and Madison opposed slavery, both were politically pragmatic and cautious advocates for a gradual, compensated emancipation. Thadious M. Davis argues convincingly that the ironic tensions built into the Constitution’s handling of slavery spill over into the tortured reasoning behind the Dred Scott (1857) decision and the U.S. v. Army (1859) decision and even into the twentieth-century American cultural imagination. See Thadius M. Davis, Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s “Go Down Moses” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
2. The phrase “long Harlem Renaissance” has recently begun to circulate so that the adjective might expand the place name’s range of associations, both chronologically and geographically. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, for example, indicates a “long Harlem Renaissance” period from the 1890s to the 1930s; this book pushes the boundaries even further, with a look at African American cultural formations from the Reconstruction era to the mid-twentieth century. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, ed., A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 2–5.
3. Unless otherwise noted, all demographic data that I cite in this book are drawn from the relevant decennial census. Online editions of decennial census reports, from the first census of 1790 to the twenty-third census of 2010, can be accessed at www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html.
4. Prior to the publication of Hughes’s The Big Sea (1940), the Harlem Renaissance was known strictly as the “Negro Renaissance,” a phrase that predates the movement itself. I trace the history of both phrases in The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American Literature (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), chap. 2.
5. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3.
6. John L. Jackson Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 19.
7. Roi Ottley, “New World A-Coming”: Inside Black America (Cleveland: World, 1943), v.
8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), xiv, 188.
9. For an overview of U.S. census questionnaires, see U.S. Census Bureau, Measuring America: The Decennial Census from 1790 to 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 2002).
10. The Census Bureau defines “census tracts” as “small, relatively permanent statistical subdivisions of a county or equivalent entity. . . . The primary purpose of census tracts is to provide a stable set of geographic units for the presentation of statistical data.” See “Geographic Terms and Concepts—Census Tract” at www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_ct.html.
11. Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
12. Soto, Modernist Nation, chap. 2.
13. It is worth taking the Senegalese writer Léopold Sédar Senghor at his word when he claims that “the discovery of black values and recognition for the Negro of his situation—was born in the United States of America.” Qtd. in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, ed., Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 13.
14. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 170.
15. I address the theoretical and practical difficulties posed by social research in much greater detail in chapter 3.
16. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” trans. Francis McDonagh, in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 194.
17. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997), xvi.
18. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), 267.
19. The growing body of scientific literature about the emergence of skin color variation in early humans has been deftly summarized by Nina G. Jablonski, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
20. I hesitate to use the word “miscegenation” given its racist origins and given its imprecision—after all, vastly different groups have always interbred, a practice that goes back at least to early interaction between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
21. Vera M. Kutzinski poses an intriguing question in relation to this very example of transliteration: “One need not to subscribe to Walter Benjamin’s view of original and translation as so many shards of a greater language to imagine some semantic overlap between the Spanish noun negro and its English counterparts. Such overlap has invited much theoretical speculation on kinship relations among the cultural formations of the African diaspora in the Americas. But can a ‘spic’ really be a ‘Negro,’ even a ‘nigger,’ and vice versa?” Vera M. Kutzinski, The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 56.
1. Measure for Measure for Measure
1. Francis Bicknell Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 10–11, 90.
2. Ibid., 217, 218.
3. The office was later renamed the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Today it is known as the Office of Coast Survey, housed since 1970 within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
4. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 215–16.
5. Ibid., 216.
6. Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 139.
7. Ibid., 140–41.
8. Paul D. Escott, “What Shall We Do with the Negro?”: Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), chap. 1; Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010); George M. Frederickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), chap. 3.
9. Foner, Fiery Trial, 17.
10. Henry Louis Gates, ed., Lincoln on Race and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 223.
11. Ibid., 226–27.
12. Frederickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent, 125.
13. Lincoln’s views on race are paradoxical even in Carpenter’s generous account. Carpenter quotes Douglass’s magnanimous description of his much-publicized White House visit, but elsewhere Carpenter indicates that Lincoln was not above deploying a racist joke to spice up a conversation. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 204, 158–59.
14. Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works, ed. Roy P. Brasler, 8 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 5:371.
15. See, for example, Frederickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent, chap. 2.
16. Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). See also Jennifer L. Hochschild and Brenna Marea Powell, “Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race,” Studies in American Political Development 22.1 (2008): 59–96.
17. U.S. Census Bureau, Eighth Census (Washington, D.C.: G. W. Bowman, 1860), x, xi, xii.
18. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923), ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Norton, 2011), lxx.
19. Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6, 2011; Felicia R. Lee, “Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White,” New York Times, December 26, 2010.
20. George Hutchinson, “Jean Toomer and the ‘New Negroes’ of Washington,” American Literature 63.4 (1991): 686–87.
21. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), 114. It is worth noting that according to Williamson’s logic, all white people must also look alike to the Census Bureau.
22. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 163; Rachel Farebrother, The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009), 94.
23. Byrd and Gates, introduction to Cane, lxvi, lxvi–lxvii, lxvii. Curiously, Byrd and Gates reproduce a later copy (dated October 28, 1932) of Toomer’s marriage certificate rather than the original filed a year earlier (lxxvii). Much of the personal information, including racial identities, on Toomer’s original State of Wisconsin marriage certificate was typed by an unknown person on the state’s form 503 1/2 and issued by the county clerk, H. R. Tongen, on October 28, 1931. Daniel Corrigan, who officiated the wedding, completed the remaining information on October 30, 1931. R. Klinert and Marion R. S. Rogers witnessed the certificate. Neither Toomer nor Latimer wrote on the document. If anyone were ever to pressure Toomer to identify as Negro in Wisconsin, one of the few states never to pass an anti-miscegenation law, it may well have been Corrigan, then the Episcopal rector of St. John’s Church in Portage and later an important figure in the U.S. civil rights movement. Corrigan was present, for example, at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech; after his retirement, he campaigned vigorously for the ordination of women clergy. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has reproduced the original Latimer–Toomer marriage certificate online: http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3837788.
24. Byrd and Gates, introduction to Cane, lxvii–lxviii.
25. See National Archives and Records Administration document numbers 927 and 929 for lists of data collected on World War I and World War II (Fourth Registration) draft cards.
26. Digital copies of microform census schedules from 1920 and 1930 can be found on the Internet Archive website, https://archive.org/.
27. Caroline F. Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-war Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 11–12.
28. Ibid., 15–23.
29. Qtd. in David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 235.
30. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Twelfth Census and the Negro Problems,” Southern Workman 29.5 (1900): 307, 308.
31. Du Bois’s volume on the Negro farmer was a highly condensed version of the manuscript that he originally submitted. Much of Du Bois’s historical commentary was struck from the published work because the Census Bureau director felt that historical interpretation lay outside the bureau’s purview and because the subject was potentially controversial. Letter from the United States Census Office to W. E. B. Du Bois, March 7, 1904, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries (hereafter cited as Du Bois Papers).
32. Du Bois, “Twelfth Census,” 307.
33. For inclusion among the “Special Committee for the Study of the Negro Problems,” Du Bois suggests five Negro leaders (including Francis J. Grimké, Kelly Miller, and Booker T. Washington) who also favored strategic, intraracial cooperation.
34. U.S. Census Bureau, Negroes in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), 15, 17, 15.
35. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 72.
36. For a thorough discussion of the politics and policies behind census racial categories, see Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, esp. chap. 2. See also Sharon M. Lee, “Racial Classifications in the U.S. Census: 1890–1990,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16.1 (1993): 75–94; and Clara E. Rodríguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000). On the subject of mixed-race census data, the Census Bureau report for the Eleventh Census (1890) concluded, “These figures are of little value. Indeed as an indication of the extent to which the races have mingled, they are misleading.” Qtd. in Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 60.
37. The census of 1960 collected primarily enumerator-designated racial data, but it introduced for the first time a subset of self-reported racial data.
38. U.S. Census Bureau, Negro Population, 1790–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 207.
39. Qtd. in Rodríguez, Changing Race, 81.
40. Qtd. in Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 68–69. According to the Census Bureau’s “Through the Decades” website, there were 70,286 enumerators in 1910 and 87,234 in 1920. See www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/. The website does not indicate the racial identities of enumerators. In a letter to Du Bois dated January 17, 1922, Census Bureau director William Mott Steuart claimed that there were over 2,000 Negro enumerators deployed in 1910 and none in previous censuses or 1920 (Du Bois Papers). The letter also anticipates subsequent conclusions regarding Negro enumerators and the mulatto population count. Crisis magazine reported in 1911 that the previous year’s census required 55,000 enumerators, of whom 1,605 were Negro, including 1,295 in the South. “Along the Color Line,” Crisis 1 (January 1911): 8.
41. For example, the ordering of the racial categories throughout the appendix follows the example of the census schedules themselves, which claim a priori to list the categories according to numerical significance. Obviously, the practice might easily be shown to reflect social as well as numerical hierarchies.
42. A search of Crisis archives at the Modernist Journal Project website (http://modjourn.org/) quickly reveals the extent of the magazine’s debt to census data.
43. It is likely that Du Bois knew Hall, at least professionally, through their mutual friend Kelly Miller. (Miller also served as Du Bois’s Crisis assistant editor.) Hall’s professional and social exploits were the occasional subject of Crisis commentary.
44. See, for example, David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, “Censuses, Identity Formation, and the Struggle for Political Power,” in Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language, ed. Kertzer and Arel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In 1936, LULAC successfully lobbied congressional leaders and the Census Bureau to eliminate the “Mexican” racial category and to count all persons of Mexican descent as “white.” See Patrick D. Lukens, A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy over “Whiteness” (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012).
45. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Random, 2004), xx.
46. Abigail Thernstrom, “Obama’s Census Identity,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2010; Patricia J. Williams, “Not-black by Default,” Nation, May 10, 2010.
1. I am deeply indebted to George Koppelman at Cultured Oyster Books in New York for sharing with me high-quality reproductions of the first-edition dust jacket and cloth cover. As he points out to me (in an email dated June 10, 2011), Macaulay paid rare attention to visual detail in the jacket and cover design, which feature matching illustrations by the key Harlem Renaissance illustrator Aaron Douglas, who was a friend of Thurman.
2. Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (1929; New York: Scribner, 1996), 21.
3. Qtd. in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997), 236.
4. Alain Locke, “Both Sides of the Color Line,” Survey 62 (June 1, 1929): 325.
5. “Harlem Negroes,” New York Times, March 17, 1929.
6. Emily Bernard, “Unlike Many Others: Exceptional White Characters in Harlem Renaissance Fiction,” Modernism /modernity 12.3 (2005): 416.
7. Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 146.
8. Qtd. in Eleonore Van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 212. Amritjit Singh provides a rare example of unabashed praise for Thurman’s novel. Singh labels The Blacker the Berry “among the better achievements of the Harlem Renaissance . . . both for what it achieves and for what it does not.” Amritjit Singh, The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–1933 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 106.
9. Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap and Yanis Varoufakis, Game Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–2.
10. Battle of the sexes is a two-player coordination game in which (usually) a husband and wife cannot recall whether they planned to meet at the opera (the wife’s preference) or at a football match (the husband’s preference); each must decide which to attend without consulting the other. The prisoner’s dilemma involves two prisoners, kept apart by their interrogators, who must separately decide whether or not to sell out their coconspirator. The princess and monster game locates us in a dark room where a princess must find the best strategy for evading a monster for the longest possible time. In all three of these examples, the separate agents receive higher or lower payoffs depending not only on their choices, but also on the choices of their fellow agent, with whom they do not communicate.
11. Robert J. Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
12. See Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); and Thadious M. Davis, Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s “Go Down Moses” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Much as Chwe and Davis assert regarding Austen and Faulkner, both Thurman’s and (as I discuss below) Hurston’s explorations of game theory derive from amateur interests in human behavior rather than theoretical interests in economic motives.
13. Thurman, Blacker the Berry, 47, 48, 49.
14. Ibid., 24, 36, 54.
15. Ibid., 95.
16. Ibid., 60.
17. Ibid., 64–65.
18. In her unpublished memoir, Louise Thompson Patterson, Thurman’s ex-wife, observes that Thurman “mocked the phenomenon of up and coming black men having to have light-skinned women in order to get ahead, although he, in a way, was doing the same thing” in choosing the light-skinned Patterson as a mate. “Memoirs: chapter 3,” box 19, folder 20, Louise Thompson Patterson papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.
19. U.S. Department of Labor, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965), 5.
20. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 67, 193.
21. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 313.
22. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 285.
23. On Moynihan’s complicated debt to Frazier, see Tony Platt, “E. Franklin Frazier and Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Setting the Record Straight,” Crime, Law and Social Change 11.3 (1987): 265–77.
24. Frazier, Negro in the United States, 318.
25. Before the 1840s, when the transatlantic slave trade exerted an influence on slave demography, African American men outnumbered African American women, and “head of household” was an anachronism within the dehumanizing plantation system.
26. When he refers to an “unhealthy tone” in “social intercourse,” Du Bois has in mind the notion that a scarcity of men results in a lowering of social standards to admit a sufficient number of men at middle-class gatherings. Elsewhere, Du Bois notes that the “unusual excess of females . . . has not often been noticed, and has not been given its true weight as a social phenomenon.” Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 55, 53. Additional early discussions of an imbalanced sex ratio among African Americans include Kelly Miller’s 1905 essay, “Surplus Negro Women,” in Race Adjustment: Essays on the Negro in America (New York: Neale, 1908); and Mary White Ovington’s 1911 study, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Schocken, 1969).
27. Mary White Ovington, a cofounder of the NAACP, observes, “In their hours of leisure the surplus women are known to play havoc with their neighbors’ sons, even with their neighbors’ husbands, for since lack of men makes marriage impossible for about a fifth of New York’s colored girls, social disorder results.” Ovington, Half a Man, 148.
28. Miller, “Surplus Negro Women,” 170.
29. U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Family, 19. For a broad overview of the reaction to the Moynihan Report, including the feminist response, see Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
30. Harlem is not a separately incorporated entity (as it was briefly in the Dutch colonies); as a result, its boundaries are necessarily artificial and slightly arbitrary. I am following the social historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg’s sound example in identifying 28 census tracts in upper Manhattan that define the geographic extent of the Harlem enclave. Greenberg singled out the 28 census tracts because in 1930 their Negro population was proportionally higher than the Negro population for Manhattan overall. See Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Because I have extended my analysis backward in time, many of these same census tracts had very small Negro populations in 1920; one (CT 204) had a Negro population of zero in that year.
31. Basic statistical analysis of arc sine conversions of the proportions that comprise figure 2.1 (percent Negro and sex ratio converted to percent female) shows a moderate positive correlation (r = 0.3828) across all 28 Harlem census tracts.
32. The sex ratios of New York City census tracts also correlated positively with the percentage of native-born white women (r = 0.355) and negatively with the percentage of foreign-born white men (r = –0.302).
33. The historian of ethnicity Joel Perlmann describes ethnic intermarriage as “American as apple pie.” Joel Perlmann, “Multiracials, Intermarriage, Ethnicity,” Society 34.6 (1997): 20.
34. I hesitate to use a hypothetical example that some might find patronizing, but similar examples were used in early twentieth-century discussions of an African American sex imbalance. Kelly Miller, for example, when considering the imbalance in urban areas, writes, “If every Negro male in these cities should be assigned a helpmeet there would still remain eighteen left-over females for every one hundred couples.” Miller, “Surplus Negro Women,” 170.
35. These sex ratios are based on data found in Nettie Pauline McGill and Ellen Nathalie Matthews, The Youth of New York City (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 8.
36. U.S. Census Bureau, Negroes in the United States, 1920–1932 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), 79.
37. Although most Harlem Renaissance novels about working women shed light on the professional classes, domestic workers made up 86 percent of the African American women’s workforce in 1910 and 71.5 percent in 1920. Louise Venable Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of Recent Migrations to Northern Centers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 90. For a full discussion of employment opportunities available to Harlem women at this time, see Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?,” chap. 3.
38. Frazier, Negro in the United States, 182.
39. Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord, Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983), 199, 207. More recently, sociologists have added to this list higher rates of male African American incarceration. Some analysts, including Moynihan, attribute a significant portion of the African American sex imbalance within official population figures to census undercounts, which disproportionately affect the African American male population.
40. See Mark A. Fossett and K. Jill Kiecolt, “Mate Availability and Family Structure among African Americans in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 55.2 (1993): 288–302; Cynthia M. Cready, Mark A. Fossett, and K. Jill Kiecolt, “Mate Availability and African American Family Structure in the U.S. Nonmetropolitan South, 1960–1990,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 59.1 (1997): 192–203; and Scott J. South and Kim M. Lloyd, “Marriage Opportunities and Family Formation: Further Implications of Imbalanced Sex Ratios,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 54.2 (1992): 440–51.
41. Fossett and Kiecolt, “Mate Availability and Family Structure,” 297.
42. McGill and Matthews, Youth of New York City, 26.
43. Deborah McDowell, “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), xii, xiii.
44. Charles W. Chesnutt, “A Matter of Principle,” in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 98–99.
45. Similar analyses might easily extend into the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A number of popular novels and films during this period (the work of Terry McMillan offers perhaps the best-known examples) dramatize the social pressures faced by African American professional women.
46. Von Neumann and Morgenstern address the prospects for economic game theory in terms of the need to quantify “rationality”: “The individual who attempts to obtain these respective maxima is also said to act ‘rationally.’ But it may safely be stated that there exists, at present, no satisfactory treatment of the question of rational behavior. There may, for example, exist several ways by which to reach the optimum position; they may depend upon the knowledge and understanding which the individual has and upon the paths of action open to him. A study of all these questions in qualitative terms will not exhaust them, because they imply, as must be evident, quantitative relationships. It would, therefore, be necessary to formulate them in quantitative terms so that all the elements of the qualitative description are taken into consideration. This is an exceedingly difficult task, and we can safely say that it has not been accomplished in the extensive literature about the topic.” John Von Neuman and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 9.
47. Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1992), 379.
48. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Lebanon, N.H.: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 68.
49. Of Fauset, Nathan Irvin Huggins writes: “Jessie Fauset tried to project the Negro image in very conventional terms. Indeed, it was her intended purpose in writing novels to place the Negro in the context of standard American life”; she “delineates middle-class Negro life, contrives problems to generate the stories.” Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 146. Lewis, in what’s meant to be a sympathetic sketch of her life, sums up Fauset’s position upon her arrival in New York in 1920 as follows: “she was already an unmarried, proper, thirty-eight-year-old Washington schoolteacher.” Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 122.
50. As William J. Maxwell observes (following Hazel Carby), Hurston serves as the key figure in the postmodern reappraisal of a romanticized rural South as the “imaginary homeland of black America.” The conceptual gesture, Maxwell adds, mirrors the ongoing demographic reversal of the early twentieth-century Great Migration. William J. Maxwell, “‘Is It True What They Say about Dixie’: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rural/Urban Exchange in Modern African-American Literature,” in Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, ed. Barbara Ching and Gerald W. Creed (New York: Routledge, 1997), 71. For an overview of recent Hurston short fiction recovery efforts and a thoughtful appraisal of two short stories, see M. Genevieve West, “‘Youse in New Yawk’: The Gender Politics of Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Lost’ Caroline Stories,” African American Review 47.4 (2014): 477–93.
51. Zora Neale Hurston, “Story in Harlem Slang,” American Mercury 55 (July 1942): 85, 87.
52. Ibid., 88–89. The American Mercury published Hurston’s “Glossary of Harlem Slang” as part of the short story; it is worth pointing out that much of the story’s relevant street language (including “pimp” and “putting out”) is not included in the glossary.
53. Zora Neale Hurston, “Monkey Junk: A Satire on Modern Divorce,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 5, 1927.
54. Ibid.
55. Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors, “The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2011.
56. Hurston, “Monkey Junk.”
57. James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 9.
58. Tendencies within social realist writing have been handled expertly by Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).
59. According to Lewis, David Belasco’s play Lulu Belle “was a racially exploitative farce that pretended to depict Harlem street life. It virtually jump-started the rush of sightseeing Caucasians to those parts of Harlem where people of color were predominant.” David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 173.
60. Thurman, Blacker the Berry, 120.
61. Neal A. Lester makes a mostly convincing case that it’s possible to read Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang” as an example of “veiled homoeroticism” between the provocatively named Jelly and Sweet Back; the short story dramatizes “the reality of heterosexual passing” and it “challenges black cultural perceptions that demand, particularly from black males, a performance that contradicts their true desires.” Neal A. Lester, “Sounds of Silent Performances: Homoeroticism in Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Story in Harlem Slang: Jelly’s Tale,’” Southern Quarterly 36.3 (1998): 18.
62. Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (1932; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 186, 187.
63. Vincent Kang Fu and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, “Broken Boundaries or Broken Marriages? Racial Intermarriage and Divorce in the United States,” Social Science Quarterly 924 (2011): 1102, 1097; Zhenchao Qian and Daniel T. Lichter, “Changing Patterns of Interracial Marriage in a Multiracial Society,” Journal of Marriage and Family 73.5 (2011): 1067.
3. Harlem Diversity
1. Rachel Farebrother, The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009), 16.
2. The polyglot, international cast of characters in Quicksand renders our preferred contemporary phrase “African American” suspect.
3. Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 49, 35, 104, 53, 111, 25.
4. Ann E. Hostetler, “The Aesthetics of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” PMLA 105.1 (1990): 35.
5. Larsen, Quicksand, 2, 50, 71, 86, 89.
6. Ibid., 59. A large plurality of Larsen scholars see Quicksand as a direct repudiation of the primitivist vogue exemplified by Van Vechten’s career and long associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
7. Ibid., 59–60.
8. Ibid., 60.
9. Marjorie Perloff, “Collage and Poetry,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1:384.
10. Mary Esteve, “Nella Larsen’s ‘Moving Mosaic’: Harlem, Crowds, and Anonymity,” American Literary History 9.2 (1997): 279.
11. When considering the alternatives offered by the cabaret versus the church crowds, the novel’s Danish interlude takes on an interesting geographic symbolism. As Larsen’s biographer George Hutchinson notes, “Larsen drew upon a fairly wide experience and intimate knowledge of [Copenhagen] at a particular moment,” right down to the novel’s reference to a specific street address where her aunt and uncle live, Maria Kirkeplads number 2. As Hutchinson points out, this small street near the train station contained a “row of bourgeois apartment buildings facing a small church off Istegrade,” the Mariakirken, or St. Mary’s Church. George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 69. It is especially worth adding that St. Mary’s was founded at the end of the nineteenth century, in a building that had previously been used as a dance hall.
12. At one point Jake forgets the words to a ballad, causing the narrator to confess, “But [Jake] could not remember most of the words, therefore Bullocky Bill cannot be presented here.” Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928; Lebanon, N.H.: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 293.
13. McKay, Home to Harlem, 28, 29, 31, 33, 55, 56, 58, 63, 65, 66, 84, 91, 105, 106, 113, 141, 146, 165, 190, 196, 219, 236, 249, 282, 289, 291, 318, 320, 55, 318.
14. Ibid., 320.
15. Michael Soto, The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American Literature (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), chap. 4.
16. McKay, Home to Harlem, 57–58.
17. Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), appendix A.
18. For a full discussion of the rise of “renaissance rhetoric” in early twentieth-century African American letters, see Soto, Modernist Nation, chap. 2.
19. Schuyler qtd. in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997), 131.
20. Walter White, “The Paradox of Color,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1992), 336.
21. James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” in Locke, The New Negro, 301.
22. Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby, eds., The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History (New York: New York Public Library, 1967), 190.
23. W. A. Domingo, “Gift of the Black Tropics,” in Locke, The New Negro, 341.
24. Census tracts were deployed in New York City for the first time with the 1910 census. Historical census data at the tract level is incomplete for 1910, however, and tract boundaries were refined after the 1910 census (thus rendering longitudinal analysis invalid). For a brief overview of the rise of the census tract, see the epilogue.
25. U.S. Census Bureau, Thirteenth Census of the United States, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), 211. The same phrasing is repeated multiple times throughout the volume as part of individual state census reports.
26. Ira De A. Reid, The Negro Immigrant, His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937 (1939; New York: AMS Press, 1968), 12.
27. The rationale for the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization at the time was to protect the jobs of native-born Americans, which explains its bureaucratic headquarters; after the functions of the bureau were split between the Commerce Department and the Labor Department in 1913, it was finally merged once again and transferred to the Justice Department in 1940.
28. Negro immigrants from Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, because they were U.S. colonial subjects, were counted among native-born Negroes. By 1930, there were 17,625 Negroes from these territories. We might also consider the fact that in 1930 there were an additional 83,361 U.S.-born Negroes of foreign or mixed parentage. Reid, Negro Immigrant, 42.
29. On the rise and role of restrictive quota policies in U.S. immigration history, see Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
30. G. E. Cumper, “Preliminary Analysis of Population Growth and Social Characteristics in Jamaica, 1943–60,” Social and Economic Studies 12.4 (1963): 401.
31. One thinks, for example, of the Afro-Cuban visual artist Wifredo Lam, the Cuban-born son of a Chinese immigrant and a mulatto Cuban woman. Although Lam sometimes exhibited in the United States—his masterwork, The Jungle (1943), resides in New York at the Museum of Modern Art—he never called it home; his wanderings more often found him in Europe and Latin America. On the Afro-Chinese presence in the South, see James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 7; and James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, 2nd ed. (Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland, 1988), chap. 6.
32. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York: Sherman, French, 1912), 1, 74.
33. Ibid., 65, 69.
34. Ibid., 65. It is perhaps ironic that slavery was not ended in Cuba until 1886, when a Spanish royal decree outlawed the practice. As Suzanne Bost recounts, abolitionist and anti-imperial sentiment in Cuba often intertwined in unexpected ways; ultimately, the “independent Cuban culture united black and white based on their shared rejection of Spanish authority,” but only after the question of abolition was long settled. Suzanne Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 102.
35. I certainly don’t wish to imply that Cuban reality lived up to the egalitarian rhetoric of its independence movement. For a full discussion of the Afro-Cuban role in the island’s independence, see Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
36. Brian Russell Roberts, “Passing into Diplomacy: U.S. Consul James Weldon Johnson and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” Modern Fiction Studies 56.2 (2010): 307.
37. Amanda M. Page, “The Ever-Expanding South: James Weldon Johnson and the Rhetoric of the Global Color Line,” Southern Quarterly 46.3 (2009): 30.
38. Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 207.
39. The elder Gómez was instrumental in establishing a long-term connection between Cuba and the Tuskegee Institute. For a full discussion of the Afro-Cuban presence at Tuskegee, see Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), chap. 1.
40. Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 80–81.
41. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933; New York: Penguin, 1990), 60.
42. Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 74. In Along This Way, Johnson had a less sanguine recollection of the Jacksonville of his adult life: “Jacksonville is today a one hundred percent Cracker town, and each time I have been back there I have marked greater and greater changes.” Johnson, Along This Way, 45.
43. Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 74, 76. Johnson’s sociocultural excurses appear less clunky if we consider the book’s original publication status as autobiographical nonfiction.
44. The historian Frank Andre Guridy describes the growth in U.S.–Cuban travel, including the rise of Afro-Cuban travel to the United States and African American travel to Cuba, during the early part of the twentieth century. Guridy, Forging Diaspora, chap. 4.
45. Johnson, Along This Way, 88–89.
46. Guridy points out that whenever large delegations of Afro-Cubans traveled the U.S. South, they faced predictable difficulties navigating the Jim Crow landscape until well into the twentieth century. Guridy, Forging Diaspora, chap. 4.
47. Larsen, Passing, 150. The Afro-Latino motif has a historical basis as well. As the historian Martha Hodes points out regarding the antebellum South, “a claim of Spanish or Portuguese nationality could erase counter-claims of blackness.” Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” American Historical Review 108.1 (2003): 103.
48. Valerie Popp, “Where Confusion Is: Transnationalism in the Fiction of Jessie Redmon Fauset,” African American Review 43.1 (2009): 132.
49. Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1928; Boston: Beacon, 1990), 287, 290.
50. Fauset, Plum Bun, 14, 196.
51. The IBGE’s race labels are neatly summarized by the sociologist Edward E. Telles: “Since 1950, the IBGE has employed the categories white (branco), brown (pardo), black (preto), Asian (amarelo), and since 1991, indigenous (indígena). . . . While white and black refer to the ends of the continuum, the census’s brown category (pardo) serves as an umbrella category for the various mixed-race terms used in popular discourse.” Edward E. Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 81.
52. Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 42. Telles and José Luis Petrucelli, an IBGE researcher, point out that a majority of Brazilians refer to themselves along the lines suggested by the official color/race categories listed on IBGE census schedules. For the comprehensive list of unofficial terms, see José Luis Petrucelli, A cor denominada: estudos sobre a classificação étnico-racial (Rio de Janeiro: DP&A, 2007).
4. Harlem Modernity
1. Emmett Jay Scott, Negro Migration during the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 3. In fact, Scott’s concluding chapter is simply a compendium of newspaper clippings that offer multiple perspectives on the effects of the Great Migration.
2. “Harding Says Negro Must Have Equality in Political Life,” New York Times, October 27, 1921.
3. “Harding Supports New Policy in South,” New York Times, October 27, 1921. Marcus Garvey understood Harding’s speech as a direct repudiation of Du Bois and thus an implicit endorsement of Garvey’s separatism. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 426–27.
4. A large plurality of animal great migration references addresses the flight patterns of birds; the work of the turn-of-the-century English ornithologist Charles Dixon offers one example rich with references to great migrations. See also the work of the influential English naturalist Richard Lydekker, who mentions great migrations of antelopes, elephants, and rhinoceroses. Nineteenth-century American naturalists routinely wrote about great migrations of bison (often in the past tense, just as the species threatened to disappear from the landscape).
5. Christopher Wills includes a chapter titled “The Great Migration” on the movement of humans from Africa to the four corners of the globe. Christopher Wills, The Darwinian Tourist: Viewing the World through Evolutionary Eyes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The science reporter Guy Gugliotta described the venture into Europe this way: “Modern humans eventually made their first forays into Europe only about 40,000 years ago, presumably delayed by relatively cold and inhospitable weather and a less than welcoming Neanderthal population. The conquest of the continent—if that is what it was—is thought to have lasted about 15,000 years, as the last pockets of Neanderthals dwindled to extinction. The European penetration is widely regarded as the decisive event of the great migration, eliminating as it did our last rivals and enabling the moderns to survive there uncontested.” Guy Gugliotta, “The Great Human Migration,” Smithsonian 39.4 (2008): 62. Until well into the twentieth century, many archaeologists and anthropologists, who often saw Africans as a polygenetic branch of the human tree or as devolved from a shared primal ancestor, mistakenly believed that human origins could be traced to Europe or the Middle East. Ironically, some refer to a great migration of early humans into Africa. Twenty-first-century investigations into the genetic connections between primitive hominids (including Neanderthals) and modern humans, including the extent to which Homo sapiens interbred with their prehistoric companions, bear an uncanny resemblance to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions about whether or not the distinct races constituted separate species. On the race/species debate, see Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 2. Modern science generally agrees that most Neanderthals had lighter skin than their human counterparts. See Nina G. Jablonski, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 44–45. Genetic overlap between contemporary humans and Neanderthals is discussed in Kate Wong, “Our Inner Neanderthal,” Scientific American 303.1 (2010): 18–20.
6. Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent; or, the Expansion of Races in America (New York: Scribner’s, 1933), 82. Writing about George Washington’s ancestors, Woodrow Wilson, then on the faculty at Princeton University, gave a rare example of great migration discourse applied to southern Cavaliers: “It was in these years Virginia got her character and received her leading gentry for the time to come—the years while the Commonwealth stood and royalists despaired, and the years immediately following the Restoration, when royalists took heart again and Englishmen turned with a new ardor to colonization as the times changed. Among the rest in the great migration came two brothers, John and Lawrence Washington, of a stock whose loyalty was as old as the Conquest.” Woodrow Wilson, “In Washington’s Day,” Harper’s 92 (January1896): 174.
7. “Anthropological Society of Washington,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 3.3 (1913): 91.
8. U.S. Census Bureau, Negro Population, 1790–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 17, 31, 32.
9. The earliest example that I have found is a July 10, 1915, article in the Washington Bee. The article reports on efforts by the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (later the National Urban League) “to check the great migration to cities, and to help those who migrate to towns to learn how to live and survive there and become like other citizens.” “Checking Migration of Negroes to Cities,” Washington Bee, July 10, 1915. As this report suggests, National Urban League leadership thought it best for the largest numbers of African Americans to remain in the South lest northern African American enclaves deteriorate into slums. Perhaps more than any other publication, Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender, which boasted a nationwide circulation, popularized the “Great Northern Drive” of southern African Americans. The Defender encouraged southerners to create migration clubs and arranged for group discounts on Chicago-bound trains. See Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 42. For an overview of Great Migration scholarship from 1918 to the 1980s, see Joe William Trotter, “Introduction: Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A Review of the Literature,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Trotter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
10. U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 7.
11. Woodson defines “bulldozing” as “a rather vague term, covering all such crimes as political injustice and persecution.” Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1918), 167, 168–69, 126.
12. Scott notes in particular that “wages in the North were double and treble those received in the South. Women who received $2.50 a week in domestic service could earn from $2.10 to $2.50 a day and men receiving $1.10 and $1.25 a day could earn from $2.50 to $3.75 a day in the various industries in the North.” Scott, Negro Migration during the War, 13, 17. According to the sociologists Daniel M. Johnson and Rex R. Campbell, “In the first 14 years of the century, more than 12 million immigrants had arrived in the United States. In 1914 alone, more than one million immigrants arrived. But the following year, the number of immigrants declined to about one-third that number, in 1916 to about one-fourth, and by 1918, there were only 110,000 new arrivals to the United States. At the same time, almost 100,000 emigrated from the United States to their European homeland.” Daniel M. Johnson and Rex R. Campbell, Black Migration and America: A Social Demographic History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981), 71–72. It should also be noted that during the early twentieth century, the African American population declined in the rural West, Midwest, and New England; this pattern suggests that a more abstract urbanization played a large role in the African American population shift.
13. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997), xxviii.
14. See, for example, Woodson, Century of Negro Migration, 183–84. There’s scant evidence, apart from the appointment of prominent African Americans to posts within the Republican administration, that the Great Migration resulted in any lasting political improvement. One coveted political post went to Emmett Jay Scott, who in 1917 became special assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Scott’s assignment was to improve the morale of African American servicemen and to press for the just application of Selective Service regulations.
15. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 57.
16. Albert J. Raboteau, “African Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel,” in Religion and American Culture: A Reader, ed. David G. Hackett (New York: Routledge, 1995), 81, 84.
17. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927; New York: Penguin, 1990), 52.
18. Some scholars have made the case that Hurston subverts the Old Testament narrative by introducing a wide range of discursive intricacies: Moses, Man of the Mountain has been read as gothic farce, Boasian cultural analysis, Oedipal tragedy, fascist nightmare, and liberation theology. As Erica R. Edwards points out, Hurston marshals these varied possibilities to complicate the Old Testament’s model of nation building via charismatic male leadership. Erica R. Edwards, “Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Black Leadership’s Gothic Tale,” Callaloo 31.4 (2008): 1084–1102.
19. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939; New York: Harper, 1991), 190.
20. Ibid., 127; Johnson, God’s Trombones, 46.
21. High-quality images of odd-numbered panels are available online from the Phillips Collection at www.phillipscollection.org/migration_series. For an excellent print catalog of the entire Migration Series, see Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ed., Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (Washington, D.C.: Rappahannock Press, 1993).
22. Qtd. in Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 156.
23. Patricia Hills, “Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series: Weavings of Pictures and Texts,” in Turner, Jacob Lawrence, 144.
24. Christopher Capozzola, “Jacob Lawrence: Historian,” Rethinking History 10.2 (2006): 291–95.
25. Martha Nadell, “Visual Art of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Teaching the Harlem Renaissance: Course Design and Classroom Strategies, ed. Michael Soto (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 57.
26. In an illuminating study of “The Wife of His Youth,” Earle V. Bryant focuses on the title’s biblical allusion (to Malachi 2, Proverbs 5, and Isaiah 54) to explore parallels between religious and racial loyalty. Earle V. Bryant, “Scriptural Allusion and Metaphorical Marriage in Charles Chesnutt’s ‘The Wife of His Youth,’” American Literary Realism 33.1 (2000): 57–64.
27. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), 1, 2.
28. Chesnutt, Wife of His Youth, 7. The language of “absorption” and “extinction” flows freely in nineteenth- and twentieth-century nativist rhetoric. Even the Eighth Census (1860) lamented that the mulatto “is doomed to comparatively rapid absorption and extinction” into the dominant racial groups. U.S. Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1864), xii.
29. Chesnutt, Wife of His Youth, 8, 7.
30. See, for example, Judith R. Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978); and Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both. Additional examples of “blue vein” literature not discussed here include Chesnutt’s “A Matter of Principle” (1899) and Sutton E. Griggs’s Overshadowed (1899). A similar example, obviously without the same racial overtones, can be found in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra refers to her “bluest veins” (II.v).
31. The historian Willard B. Gatewood writes of “blue veinism” in a number of U.S. cities, finding a close connection between blue veinism and communities of free blacks with long histories prior to emancipation. Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), chaps. 5 and 6.
32. Chesnutt, Wife of His Youth, 1. Gatewood writes, “In possessing a reputation for a ‘blue-vein element,’ few cities equaled that of Cleveland. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries references to its existence regularly appeared in print.” Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 159. It should be noted that the sources cited by Gatewood predate “The Wife of His Youth,” suggesting that the story’s popularity did not spur the blue vein references.
33. Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (1929; New York: Scribner, 1996), 6.
34. Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, ed. Claudia Tate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 196.
35. Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 146.
36. Thurman, Blacker the Berry, 6, 7. Much has been written about the nineteenth century’s association of dark skin and working-class status, followed by the twentieth century’s association of a suntan and leisure activity. See, for example, Kerry Segrave, Suntanning in 20th Century America (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005).
37. See, for example, William Ross Wallace’s encomium to the American landscape, “Rest of the Nation,” which compares a river to “a blue vein on sleeping Beauty’s breast.” William Ross Wallace, Meditations in America (New York: Scribner, 1851), 135. William Gilmore Simms extended Shakespeare’s notion that Cleopatra displayed a “blue vein” on the “heaving wave” of her breast in his blank verse drama The Death of Cleopatra (1852). William Gilmore Simms, Poems, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1853), 2:332. Elizabeth Barrett Browning refers to a blue-veined brow in her “Aurora Leigh” (1864). In his epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), Herman Melville curiously represents an ascetic monk’s blue-veined feet.
38. See, for example, the American-born geographer and physician John Mitchell’s “An Essay upon the Causes of the Different Colours of People in Different Climates,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 43.472–77 (1746): 102–50, which includes a section titled “The Skins of Negroes Are of a Thicker Substance, and Denser Texture, Than Those of White People, and Transmit No Colour thro’ Them.” The essay later served as the basis for Mitchell’s 1748 election to the Royal Society. Today he is remembered for the famous Mitchell Map (1755) of North America.
39. Segrave, Suntanning in 20th Century America, 181.
40. Jo M. Martin et al., “Changes in Skin Tanning Attitudes: Fashion Articles and Advertisements in the Early 20th Century,” American Journal of Public Health 99.12 (2009): 2143, 2144.
41. Finsen focused on the treatment of lupus vulgaris, but similar procedures were soon developed to treat “anemia, Hodgkin’s disease, chronic renal disease, syphilis, and septic wounds.” Henry W. Randle, “Suntanning: Differences in Perceptions throughout History,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 72.5 (1997): 462, 463. Segrave’s Suntanning in the 20th Century reproduces a number of early twentieth-century print advertisements for sunlamps.
42. George S. Schuyler, Black No More (1931; New York: Modern Library, 1999), 11.
43. Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both, 75. For a thoughtful discussion of Black No More in light of contemporaneous racial discourse, see Jane Kuenz, “American Racial Discourse, 1900–1930: Schuyler’s Black No More,” Novel 30.2 (1997): 170–94.
44. Schuyler, Black No More, 150, 177, 178.
45. Ibid., 179–80. The science historian Carolyn Thomas de la Peña argues that Schuyler’s model for Crookman was Dr. Henry Pancoast, an X-ray scientist who in 1904 was erroneously credited with turning the skin of Negroes white. Pancoast strenuously denied that he ever engaged in such efforts. See Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, “‘Bleaching the Ethiopian’: Desegregating Race and Technology through Early X-Ray Experiments,” Technology and Culture 47.1 (2006): 27–55.
46. Chesnutt, Wife of His Youth, 3–4, 5.
47. Because there was no practical way of reproducing color illustrations, the medieval and early modern blazon, typically found in catalogs of nobility, described the heraldic symbols rather than picturing them. The French and Anglo-Norman terminology used to describe blazons, according to Gerard J. Brault, was formalized by the end of the thirteenth century. Gerard J. Brault, Early Blazon: Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with Special Reference to Arthurian Heraldry (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1997).
48. Chesnutt, Wife of His Youth, 10.
49. Ibid., 9.
50. The Arthurian parallel in “The Wife of His Youth” would place Ryder in the position of Guinevere: he must choose between loyalty to his spouse or romantic fulfillment. If we extend the analogy, Molly Dixon plays the role of Lancelot and ’Liza Jane improbably plays the role of Arthur. Unlike Arthurian legend (including Tennyson’s), “The Wife of His Youth” restores the sanctity of “Arthurian” genealogy by reuniting Ryder and ’Liza Jane. Curiously, Clyde O. De Land’s illustration for the story (“This is the Woman, and I am the Man”) depicts ’Liza Jane in a manner virtually identical to the Blue Vein women also seen in the picture.
51. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1992), 48.
52. Baker credits Chesnutt with a “mastery of form” in his “ability to give the trick to white expectations, securing publication for creative work that carries a deep-rooted African sound.” Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 49. I agree with Baker on the question of Chesnutt’s literary self-fashioning; however, I think that in his use of the blazon (among other devices), Chesnutt also qualifies as one who explicitly and aggressively reworks literary raw material.
53. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923), ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Norton, 2011), 30.
54. See, for example, Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); George Hutchinson, “Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35.2 (1993): 226–50; and Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr, Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Contemporaneous reviews of Cane tend not to address “Portrait in Georgia.”
55. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 62.
56. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1935), 6.
57. The measurement is called the “paper bag test”: the color of a commonly used brown paper grocery bag serves as the dividing line between light-skinned persons who can pass for white and dark-skinned persons who cannot pass. See, for example, Audrey Elisa Kerr, The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006). For a detailed analysis of Charles B. Davenport’s outlandish experiments with a spin-top color wheel made by the toy and board-game company Milton Bradley, see Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both, chap. 4.
58. Charles W. Chesnutt, “What Is a White Man?,” Independent 41 (May 30, 1889): 5–6.
59. In South Carolina in 1830, slaves made up 54.3 percent of the state’s total population (315,401 out of 581,185).
60. H. Bailey, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Appeals of South Carolina, on Appeal from the Courts of Law, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: A. E. Miller, 1834), 2:559.
61. Ariela J. Gross, “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Yale Law Journal 108.1 (1998): 126.
62. W. R. Hill, Reports of Cases at Law, Argued and Determined in the Court of Appeals, of South Carolina, 3 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: McCarter, 1857), 2:614. A leading booster of John C. Calhoun’s nullification movement, Harper would write a lengthy apology for slavery in the years following his Cantey decision. See William Harper, Memoir on Slavery, Read before the Society for the Advancement of Learning, of South Carolina, at Its Annual Meeting at Columbia, 1837 (Charleston, S.C.: J. S. Burges, 1838).
63. On the social constructionist tendencies of nineteenth-century racial jurisprudence, see Daniel J. Sharfstein, “The Secret History of Race in the United States,” Yale Law Journal 112.6 (2003): 1473–1509.
64. Charles W. Chesnutt, The House behind the Cedars (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900), 168, 172.
65. Ibid., 160, 167. At this same point in the novel Judge Straight pulls out a legal volume and reads from State v. Davis.
66. Chesnutt criticism routinely and often disparagingly assigns the “tragic mulatto” label to The House behind the Cedars.
67. Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1, 42.
1. Even today’s scholars of the Harlem Renaissance who mention the parade tend to ignore or quickly move past the Red Summer riots later in 1919.
2. Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 49, 91.
3. James de Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), appendixes 1 and 2.
4. Rudolph Fisher, The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher, ed. John McCluskey Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 35.
5. Fisher opens yet another Atlantic Monthly short story, “The Promised Land” (1927), by bringing modern Harlem into contact with religious antiquity: “At a certain level of the airshaft two songs, issuing from opposite windows, met, mingled in minor refrains, and rose together toward Negro Harlem’s black sky; two futile prayers which spent themselves like a mist ere they reached the roof. The one was a prayer for the love of man, the other a prayer for the love of God: ‘blues,’ and a spiritual.” Ibid., 48. In 1938, Louis Armstrong performed a similar fusion when he recorded “Jonah and the Whale,” a song that found its way into the album Louis and the Good Book (1958).
6. Ibid., 35.
7. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xviii.
8. John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 295–96; for a wonderfully illustrated discussion of the diffusion of the urban grid in U.S. urban planning, see chaps. 9–11. For a brief overview of the grid pattern from antiquity to the early modern era, see Dan Stanislawski, “The Origin and Spread of the Grid-Pattern Town,” Geographical Review 36.1 (1946): 105–20.
9. An excellent assortment of maps can be found in Paul E. Cohen and Robert T. Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, 1527–1995 (New York: Rizzoli, 1997). The most comprehensive printed collection of New York maps remains I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909: Compiled from Original Sources and Illustrated by Photo-intaglio Reproductions of Important Maps, Plans, Views, and Documents in Public and Private Collections, 6 vols. (New York: R. H. Dodd, 1915–1928).
10. Cohen and Augustyn, Manhattan in Maps, 64; Reps, Making of Urban America, 296.
11. For a full discussion of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, see Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), chaps. 5–8.
12. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (1938; New York: Harcourt, 1970), 183, 185, 184, 126.
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1926–1928), 2:100, 99.
15. Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People, trans. Francis E. Hyslop Jr. (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), 47–48.
16. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), part 3.
17. Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White, 50.
18. Mumford, Culture of Cities, 188.
19. Beginning in 1939, however, Gunnar Myrdal conducted the research for his famous study, An American Dilemma (1944), out of the Chrysler Building’s 46th floor. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 623.
20. Fisher, City of Refuge, 115.
21. Ulla Ehrensvärd, “Color in Cartography: A Historical Survey,” in Art and Cartography, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 138. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, art instruction manuals recommended the hand painting of printed maps as a useful means for the ruling class to learn geographic markers and boundaries.
22. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner’s, 1890), 25.
23. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 5, 251.
24. Ibid., 266.
25. On the invention of the halftone, see David Clayton Phillips, “Art for Industry’s Sake: Halftone Technology, Mass Photography, and the Social Transformation of American Print Culture, 1880–1920” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1996). A full-color version of Stoddard’s map can be found at the Wikimedia Commons website, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stoddard_race_map_1920.jpg.
26. “There is no immediate danger of the world being swamped by black blood,” Stoddard concedes. “But there is a very imminent danger that the white stocks may be swamped by Asiatic blood.” He adds that “with the development of cheap and rapid transportation, nature’s barriers are down. Unless man erects and maintains artificial barriers the various races will increasingly mingle, and the inevitable result will be the supplanting or absorption of the higher by the lower types.” Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color, 87, 90, 301, 302.
27. Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent; or, the Expansion of Races in America (New York: Scribner’s, 1933), 352, 348, 351.
28. The line print technology deployed in the reproduction of Grant’s maps is fairly primitive; however, the use of maps in statistical interpretation was still a recent development. The statistical analysis of racial identity in the United States, where the practice was pioneered, had been in use only since the U.S. Civil War. See introduction.
29. Grant, Conquest of a Continent, 283. Grant was hardly alone in associating the larger civil rights movement with the communist threat. For example, A. Mitchell Palmer, who served as U.S. attorney general from 1919 to 1921, routinely (if usually incorrectly) linked African American intellectuals and groups with international socialism and communism.
30. Ibid., 286.
31. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930; New York: Da Capo, 1991), 147.
32. Ibid., 145.
33. In the undated text of a speech titled “Harlem, the Negro Metropolis,” Fisher, a medical doctor by training and trade, presented Seventh Avenue in similar fashion, calling it “Harlem’s transverse aorta.” Fisher, City of Refuge, 330. Le Corbusier lamented that the world’s “great capitals have no arteries; they have only capillaries.” Le Corbusier, City of Tomorrow, 13.
34. Fisher, City of Refuge, 36.
35. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 146, 147.
36. John L. Jackson Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 9.
37. Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 298, 303.
38. In “The Making of Harlem,” his contribution to the Harlem number of the Survey Graphic (1925), Johnson introduced many of the same ideas that he deploys in Black Manhattan. He also reproduces a map that very closely resembles his “Negro Harlem 1925” map shown in this chapter. And while Johnson stresses that, unlike African American enclaves in most U.S. cities, Harlem is not a ghetto, he also includes photographs of densely peopled Harlem street scenes, which bear some resemblance to the oft-printed photographs of urban ghettos, the type popularized in the late nineteenth century by Jacob Riis and found in contemporaneous discussions of immigration. Johnson’s Harlemites, it must be stressed, tend to dress professionally in suits and hats rather than the usual shabby immigrant garb.
39. In Stoddard’s words: “The whole course of modern urban and industrial life is disgenic [sic]. . . . [M]odern civilization has been one-sided, abnormal, unhealthy—and nature is exacting penalties which will increase in severity until we either fully adapt or finally perish.” Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color, 302, 303.
40. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 150. Most historians of New York point out that African Americans began to settle in the neighborhood well before Payton founded his Afro-American Realty Company in 1904; however, the efforts of Payton and others (including several African American churches) dramatically accelerated African American settlement in Harlem during the 1910s and ’20s.
41. E. Franklin Frazier similarly wrote that “the sudden descent of this vast human tide upon a few northern cities constituted a flight, replete with dramatic episodes, from medieval to modern America.” E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 291.
42. The Harlem historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg makes a convincing case that in reality Harlem bore all the hallmarks of a depressed urban community as early as the 1910s. See Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
43. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper, 1966), ix.
44. Ibid., 179, 187.
45. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 192.
46. A parallel debate took shape surrounding the “Americanness” of New York City during the early part of the twentieth century. As Angela M. Blake demonstrates, nativists, promoters of tourism, and a host of additional voices during this time clashed over the true meaning of the city’s ethnic pluralism: were ethnic enclaves harbors of potentially subversive difference, or were they picturesque settings worthy of a tourist’s time and money? See Angela M. Blake, How New York Became American, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
47. Frazier, Negro in the United States, 265, 262, 264.
48. Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (1929; New York: Scribner, 1996), 214.
1. See chapter 1.
2. The Census Bureau developed guiding principles for determining census tract boundaries in 1934, long after Harlem’s census tracts came into existence.
3. E. Franklin Frazier, “Negro Harlem: An Ecological Study,” American Journal of Sociology 43.1 (1937): 74. Frazier’s earlier study, The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), deploys census data using a similar methodology. But Frazier’s Chicago zones extend linearly, from north to south between Twelfth and Seventy-First Streets; thus they lack the radial patterning that defines his Harlem zones. Frazier’s Chicago study also develops a geospatial argument about mulattoes, who cluster in the better-off southern zones; the geographic distribution of mulattoes does not enter into his Harlem discussion. It is also worth noting that the Harlem concentric-zones analysis, subsequently featured in The Negro Family in the United States, has proven far more influential on subsequent scholarship; in a search done in early 2016 Google Scholar identified 369 citations of The Negro Family in Chicago and 1,790 citations of The Negro Family in the United States.
4. Frazier, “Negro Harlem,” 75.
5. Howard Whipple Green and Leon E. Truesdell, Census Tracts in American Cities: A Brief History of the Census Tract Movement, with an Outline of Procedure and Suggested Modifications (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1937), 1.
6. Walter Laidlaw, “Federation Districts and a Suggestion for a Convenient and Scientific City Map System,” Federation 4.4 (1906): 5.
7. The Census Bureau did not publish tract-level data until the 1940 census. Even then, it favored publishing data by assembly districts or wards in its most widely disseminated reports.
8. Arthur L. Swift, “Doctor Laidlaw’s Vision: The Early Years,” in Golden Anniversary of Census Tracts, 1956 (Washington, D.C.: American Statistical Association, 1956), 4–5.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Walter Laidlaw, “Religious Belief and Race Suicide,” Federation 3.1 (1903): 34, 37, 40, 38.
11. Donald L. Foley, “Census Tracts and Urban Research,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 48 (1953): 733–34.
12. Robert E. Park, “The Urban Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order,” in Urban Community, ed. E. W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), 3.
13. This is not to say that all demographers find the census tract beyond improvement; see, for example, Barrett A. Lee et al., “Beyond the Census Tract: Patterns and Determinants of Racial Segregation at Multiple Geographic Scales,” American Sociological Review 73.5 (2008): 766–91. Because the census tract has been in existence in some areas for over a century, however, few if any demographers would sacrifice the ability to compare geographic data over time by replacing the census tract as the basic unit of census geography.
14. Rudolph Fisher, The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher, ed. John McCluskey Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 159, 160, 161, 164. As Emily Bernard reports, Fisher was one of a handful of writers who reviewed the manuscript of Nigger Heaven prior to its 1926 publication. Emily Bernard, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 114.
15. Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (1926; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 149.
16. Park, “Urban Community,” 15, 13.
17. As of 2016 the Census Bureau plans to drop “Negro” from its racial nomenclature and to continue allowing respondents to indicate multiple racial identities simultaneously. (The American Community Survey of 2014 was the first not to include “Negro.”) The most contentious debate in anticipation of the 2020 census centers on the question of whether or not to consider Hispanic/Latino a “racial” category.