While the location and duration of the movement popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance remain highly contested, its importance in the development of African American literature – and “modernism” in general – is more widely accepted today than ever. Central to the movement then known as the “Negro Renaissance” was the effort of black writers and artists after World War I to re-conceptualize “the Negro” independent of white myths and stereotypes that had affected African Americans’ own relationship to their heritage and each other – independent, too, of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about those features of African American life that whites might take to confirm racist beliefs. The struggle with one-dimensional mainstream stereotypes was, of course, far from over, and it was hardly new; a central feature of the work of Frances E. W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt in the 1890s, it played a major role in such novelistic “forerunners” to “renaissance” fiction as James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece. But in the 1920s and 1930s a burst of black-authored fiction published by new and prestigious New York houses helped transform the landscape of African American, and by extension American, fiction. At the same time, it had an immense quickening effect on black literature internationally.
The sudden expansion can be attributed to many causes, but perhaps the four crucial factors were the Great Migration from the rural South and the Caribbean to Northern cities, new intellectual currents concerned with cultural pluralism and anti-racism, the dramatic growth of the black middle class and of literacy from Reconstruction forward, and the transformation of the American culture industry after 1915. These developments also form basic integuments of most of the black novels published in the 1920s and 1930s, despite great variations in theme, cultural politics, and aesthetic approach. Collectively, the novels are notable for their concentration on contemporary life and its social and cultural instability – its “modernity.” But equally striking are intense contrasts in cultural politics, strong disagreements about such essential issues as the meaning and value of racial identity as such, and deeply conflicting approaches to novelistic form and technique.
The widespread belief that patrons and publishers turned away from black fiction (supposedly a 1920s fad) in the 1930s is belied by the fact that more novels by black authors appeared from more presses in the 1930s than in the 1920s – and this happened during a major contraction in the publication of American fiction generally. The number of black authors supported by patrons in the 1920s was actually very small in comparison to the number supported by federal programs in the 1930s, and these programs developed from the intellectual networks of the 1920s. Several authors identified with the 1920s published their first novels in the 1930s – most notably Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, and Countee Cullen. The Negro Renaissance, notably, changed the very meaning of the term “Negro novel.” Before and during the 1920s, both black and white authors and critics routinely used the phrase to designate novels by either whites or blacks focusing on “Negro” subject matter. By the mid- to late 1930s, this was no longer true: “Negro fiction” had come to designate, by and large, fiction by Negroes. The semantic shift marks the emergence of a semi-autonomous, highly diversified field of artistic expression, and a growing acknowledgment of black writers’ authority over the literary representation of African American experience.
One of the first novels of the “Harlem Renaissance” proper (that is, the phase of the Negro Renaissance centered in Harlem following World War I), Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924) meditated on the significance of the rise of the black middle class, New Negro race consciousness, and the transformation of the culture industry as black music and performance art began making inroads into the “legitimate” theater. Within the form of the novel of manners and the thematic frame of racial “uplift,” Fauset advocated, in the clear moral terms of an essentially liberal ideology, American patriotism, hope for the future, and African American solidarity across class, gender, and generational lines. In this novel, the “American” future belongs to the descendants of Negroes, whose moral superiority and generations of servitude make them the appropriate inheritors of the “best” of American traditions. Yet to come into their own, they must overcome the various forms of “confusion” white supremacy has brought about within the race – intraracial “colorism,” class snobbishness, internalized racism, self-defeating bitterness bred by white prejudice, lack of race pride, even excessive moral earnestness among talented idealists of the race. On the other hand, white Americans in this novel have mortgaged their future to racism and shallow materialism. Essentially a romantic novel of manners with a classic comic resolution, There Is Confusion showcases some of the core beliefs, anxieties, and weaknesses of the New Negro elite in order to finally justify their intellectual and moral leadership.1
The same point can be made about Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924), focused on the career and ultimate lynching of Kenneth Harper, MD – a brilliant graduate of Atlanta University and medical school in the North, a veteran of World War I and, as the novel opens, a proud young physician starting his career in his South Georgia hometown. Clearly a “message novel” on the necessity of civil rights activism, The Fire in the Flint informs white readers about the existence of a distinguished black professional class held back by irrational prejudice, and castigates the nation for its racial barbarism. Accommodation to the mores of Southern segregation, the book reveals, can no longer keep any Negro safe. While neither Fauset’s nor White’s first novels departed dramatically from earlier models produced by Frances E. W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt, and while neither made major innovations in novelistic form, they demonstrated the potential for black-authored fiction to make a mark in the literary field as a new set of “modernist” publishers took interest in American cultural diversity and radical critique. The work that really broke the mold and helped inspire new forms of African American fiction was published a year before Fauset’s and White’s – Jean Toomer’s multi-generic tour de force, Cane (1923).
While not exactly a novel, Cane explored many of the different possibilities for black fiction that would be taken up by others and worked out in novelistic form. Toomer borrowed techniques and structural innovations eclectically from such literary models as the “lyric novels” of Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank and the drama of Eugene O’Neill, while infusing these with the improvisatory qualities and the rhythms of African American spirituals and jazz, the latter of which, to Toomer, epitomized American modernism in the field of music. This merging of forms associated with different racial backgrounds of avant-garde art suited his belief in the birth of a new “American race” – an idea one can find in his predecessor Charles Chesnutt and that remained a minor yet significant thread in Negro Renaissance thought and art. Toomer’s creation of a hybrid literary form consonant with new types of popular culture suggested exciting possibilities for black literary experimentation and implied the need to improvise new idioms and new formal and technical strategies for an adequate expression of African American responses to human experience.
By 1926, following the publication of White’s and Fauset’s first novels; of books of poetry by Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes; and of the landmark anthology The New Negro, black literary circles around the country – but especially in New York – debated the new possibilities for black writing and different positions on what forms “the literature of the Negro” should take. Was there, or should there be, such a thing as “Negro art”? Was there anything so distinctive about black culture and experience that it called for special methods of poetic or fictional representation? What relationship should there be between African American culture and African art? Were there aspects of black experience that, in the context of the struggle to overcome centuries of demeaning caricature in European and American art, and in the context of a current vogue for the “primitive,” ought to be left alone? Would black authors allow the expectations of white audiences and institutions to corrupt and co-opt their talent? Whereas in the early 1920s W. E. B. Du Bois had castigated black readers for insisting on melodramatic plots, fantastically good heroes and heroines, and racial propaganda generally – all potentially inimical to artistic achievement – by 1926 he feared the Negro Renaissance was becoming apolitical, that white editors and audiences had seduced black artists into a hollow aestheticism – or worse. “All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists,” he announced in “Criteria of Negro Art.” The abandonment of propaganda that the philosopher Alain Locke had called for in his essays for The New Negro, Du Bois feared, would “turn the Negro Renaissance into decadence.”2 Writers, theorists, and literary historians have long commented on the black novelist’s problem of a “divided audience” (that is, an audience divided between blacks and whites); in the 1920s, divisions within the African American readership were just as significant.
The white novelist and music critic Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven dropped into the midst of this debate with incendiary éclat and made vividly evident wide divergences of opinion on the directions black fiction should take.3 By placing the abortive relationship between an aspiring black novelist and a frustrated black librarian (named Mary Love) at the center of the novel, Van Vechten tried to suggest the potential of a black literary universe begging to be born – comprising novels of the black underworld, of the glamorous as well as “low-down” cabarets, of the striving middle class and struggling young professionals, of those who “pass,” of Harlem’s everyday working people, of the white interlopers and “friends of the Negro,” as well as slummers and mediocre writers looking for “material,” of the black vamps and “sweetmen,” and of blues women and jazz men. Attempting (unsuccessfully) to patch together examples of all these different types of fiction around the central romantic tragedy, spiced up with sensational scenes of sadomasochism and a title guaranteed to shock, Nigger Heaven became a kind of Rorshach test of literary taste – and a bestseller. Many black readers found the novel a vicious slander on their race, but Van Vechten’s friends in Harlem – including several of the most important novelists of the renaissance – warmly praised the novel, were reviled by its critics, and kept writing. Two of them were Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher, whom Van Vechten and Walter White steered to their own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
Larsen’s semi-autobiographical Quicksand (1928) followed the labyrin-thine search for “home” of a young woman born in a Chicago slum to a Danish immigrant woman and a black man. In a radical subversion of earlier patterns of tragic mulatto fiction and romances of racial uplift, Larsen explores the subordination of family to race, the articulation of race with male dominance, and the enslavement of women’s bodies to procreation of racial subjects alienated from themselves and their mothers by national ideologies of racial and class identity.4 As Hazel Carby has argued, it would be some twenty years before black women’s fiction returned to such a complex, comprehensive confrontation of race, class, and sexuality within an urban setting.5 Larsen, whose feminism derived in part from her nursing career and the experience of being torn from her white mother by racial segregation, reveals black feminist consciousness not as an “inheritance” from Southern folk or the creation of college-trained intellectuals but as a critical and highly diversified feature of modernity, responding to historically specific modes of women’s oppression and subordination, always articulated with racial power.
In contrast to Larsen, Jessie Fauset remained wedded to the traditional romance format and to the ideology of racial uplift, believing in the essential moral superiority of African Americans and the ideal of race as a focus of personal identity. In Fauset’s “passing” novel, Plum Bun, Angela Murray decides to “pass” as white, only to discover the shallowness and corrupt nature of white society. She learns that she is much better off within the fold of her own race and family. After a series of plot twists generated in the first instance by Angela’s racial confusion and moral weakness, eventually all ends well with the leading women characters reconciled, properly matched to men of their own race, and devoted to the cause of racial advance. Subtitled “A Novel Without a Moral” in a direct slap, apparently, at Carl Van Vechten’s recently published Nigger Heaven (which had been reviewed positively in the black-owned New York Age under the heading “A Novel With a Moral”) and possibly Claude McKay’s Banjo (subtitled “A Story Without a Plot”), Plum Bun exemplified the sort of idealism, optimism, and pride of race that many African Americans believed the white publishing industry would not accept in “Negro fiction.”6
Only a few weeks after Plum Bun’s appearance, Alfred A. Knopf brought out Nella Larsen’s Passing novel, dedicated to Carl Van Vechten and his wife, Fania Marinoff, in a clear statement of where Larsen stood in the contemporary debates over black fiction. Again shredding the seams of the conventional romance – and, for that matter, earlier passing fiction – Larsen almost exactly inverts Plum Bun’s narrative logic and structural resolutions. While in most earlier black-authored “passing” novels the goal of passing is to get what white people have, and to be “free,” in Larsen’s novel Clare Kendry passes in order to get what her better-off black friends have, for her family background precludes her moving into their class position within the carefully policed boundaries of respectable black society. Ultimately feeling trapped and lonely in the white world, she seeks to return to the black world, fearless about whether she will be “found out” by her racist husband. Whereas “Angele Mory” (“Dead Angel”) is reborn as Angela Murray after happily rejoining the race at the end of Plum Bun, in Larsen’s novel, Clare’s closest black friend, Irene Redfield, is determined to prevent her return to the “race.” In a striking reversal of the usual tropes connecting whiteness with freedom and blackness with unfreedom, Irene decides she cannot “have [Clare] free” – that is, free of her white identity, or her husband – and kills her just as her identity as a black white woman is exposed.7 The novel ingeniously develops Irene’s feelings of attraction to and repulsion from the transgressive subjectivity of a woman both black and white – whose brazen border-crossings threaten the boundaries on which Irene’s secure life has been carefully built. Daring in her address to issues of homoeroticism, Larsen at the same time spotlights the threat (and fetishistic appeal) of interraciality to racial order.8 Even structurally, Passing practically inverts the patterns of the classic romance that emerged in the context of legitimating European “races” and nations.
The intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the urban black context also defines the geography of Rudolph Fisher’s first novel, The Walls of Jericho (1928), but with the focus on black men. Fisher sets his narrative in the midst of black Harlem’s expansion and attempts to comprehend all classes of black society. In particular, the novel addresses the class division between “dickties” and “rats” – professional and working-class men – with an understated theme that African Americans in the city need a “business class, an economic backbone” that would bind the “dickties” and “rats” together.9 The hopeful vision of the future with which the novel ends derives from a conviction that blacks can make capitalism work for them if they can join together and overcome barriers to self-knowledge – the “walls of Jericho” named in the title. The core of the novel, however, focuses on those barriers to self-knowledge as conditioned by historical trauma and white racism; and these barriers are highly gendered. Men turn the anger born of that trauma toward each other, or remain imprisoned by an obsessive hatred that isolates them and prevents self-knowledge, even in those most dedicated to the common cause of the “race.” Fisher analyzes the hard shell that black men wear to keep from exposing weakness or fear, a shell that affects their relationships with each other as well as with women – preventing them from expressing tenderness or friendship openly. He presents glimpses, nonetheless, of a deep fraternal bond black men too rarely acknowledge openly. A greater self-knowledge, he implies, would allow black men to renegotiate all their human relationships in more productive ways – relationships, particularly, with each other and with black women. This would become a classic theme in twentieth-century black fiction.
Fisher’s second novel, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), apparently only the second black-authored mystery novel, also essentially circles around issues of black masculinity in American society, but in an even more obsessive and perhaps psychologically revealing way. The Harlem detective, Perry Dart, and the physician who assists him, Dr. John Archer, must solve the mystery of who murdered an African “psychist” named N. Frimbo during a psychic session. It turns out that Frimbo was not murdered (although he will be in the end), and the conventional “murder mystery” pattern is soon overshadowed by a series of mysterious motifs concerning male sexuality, beginning with questions about an “over-absence of the feminine” in Frimbo’s apartment. In the early chapters of the novel, Dart and Archer discover in the rear room of Frimbo’s flat a chemical workbench and cabinets, one of which contains a specimen jar containing two male “sex glands.” The real mystery, from this point on, centers around the meaning and origin of the pair of testicles. Near the novel’s close, Frimbo reveals to Archer the African rite that has been a secret of his family for hundreds of years, “the rite of the gonad” that maintains “the unbroken heritage of the past.” The protoplasm within the gonad, “continuously maintained throughout thousands of generations,” turns out to be the very key to freedom, for “[H]e who can master his past – that man is free.”10 This emphasis on mastery of the past as the key to freedom, and specifically of male freedom and masculine potency, responds to the emasculation of black American men, the loss of African cultural foundations, and the continuous erasure of or assault on father–son ties – a theme in later black fiction, notably by Alex Haley and Toni Morrison. Yet the apparent equation of racial self-possession and “freedom” with recovery of hereditary male authority and sexual dominance stands in powerful tension with, for example, the feminist aspects of Larsen’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction.
Toomer’s turn to “folk” sources in the first section of Cane connected with contemporary interest in “authentic” experience and/or expression in the modern wasteland, as understood by transatlantic modernists. This strain of modernist thinking and art tended toward primitivism and romanticism, as well as toward the belief, going back to the eighteenth century, that all cultures develop from a distinctive “folk” background. The success of the Irish Renaissance and of new Russian drama based on peasant life helped stimulate artistic interest in the “black folk” of the South and their cultural expressions. Moreover, critically acclaimed “Negro folk novels” by whites such as DuBose Heyward and Julia Peterkin created a stir in black intellectual circles and encouraged the move toward a fiction based on the lives of the people “farthest down.” Authors such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston began not just incorporating folk forms into fiction, but bending generic conventions to create novelistic equivalents to popular black musical and narrative forms – specifically blues, ballads, and folktales.
Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) takes its readers on a detailed tour of what McKay termed the “semi-underworld” of black working-class life, among the buffet flats and speakeasies frequented by single black men. McKay deliberately defied the critics who insisted black art should serve racial uplift, partly because he thought they knew nothing about art, and partly because their point of view was too conservatively bourgeois. McKay, a radical socialist at the time, no doubt felt he was writing a type of proletarian novel. His very choice of the picaresque tale as opposed to the more complex plotting of the classic novel constitutes a gesture of independence from bourgeois conventions.
The novel centers on the adventures of Jake, a longshoreman who deserted from the US Army during World War I. On his first night back in Harlem, he picks up a charming occasional prostitute who likes him so much she returns his payment for her services. Jake spends much of the rest of the novel hoping to find his beautiful “brownskin” again, while McKay introduces us to a considerable range of black male working-class “types,” first in Harlem, then on the railroad and in a variety of cities where black railroad employees stop over between runs. Throughout, blues music provides a kind of steady backbeat and refrain, distilling the rhythms and “melancholy-comic” quality of the black workingman’s response to existence. Most important of the characters other than Jake is the Haitian intellectual and aspiring novelist, Ray, who generally enunciates McKay’s intellectual and aesthetic principles. Like McKay, Ray aspires to make art out of the “fertile reality around him,” signifying McKay’s belief in the proletarian or peasant black’s “primitive birthright,” the most valuable weapon for human self-preservation in the modern world and a central component of McKay’s black cultural nationalism.11 Believing that the future of the race depends on those (mostly dark-skinned and lower-class) still in touch with their “primitive” selves, McKay depicts their lives unapologetically, and yet in a romantic way that betrays his own sense of intellectual superiority to their authentic yet rather unreflective lives.12
When Home to Harlem became a bestseller – the only black-authored novel of the period to so succeed commercially – its critics felt vindicated in their judgment that this was the sort of black fiction white readers wanted; conversely, they reasoned, it was exactly what the black community did not need, and McKay shared in the obloquy showered upon Van Vechten for Nigger Heaven, which many (wrongly) thought McKay had tried to emulate. W. E. B. Du Bois fumed, “After the dirtier parts of its filth, I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” McKay, he charged, had prostituted his talent to the “prurient demand” of a “certain decadent section of the white American world.”13 Rejecting the criticism of black periodicals, McKay wrote Langston Hughes, “We must leave the appreciation of what we are doing to the emancipated Negro intelligentsia of the future, while we are sardonically aware now that only the intelligentsia of the superior race is developed enough to afford artistic truth.”14
Significantly, Langston Hughes considered Home to Harlem “undoubtedly the best thing we’ve done yet.”15 In Not Without Laughter (1930), following in important respects the lead of McKay but in a more middle-American cultural geography, Hughes strove to depict “more or less typical small-town life in any town outside of the South . . . the average, small Main Street town.”16 The texture of black working-class life had never been rendered with such unapologetic tenderness and fidelity as in this novel centering on the life of young James “Sandy” Rodgers. Hughes exposed, with searing authority, the everyday wounds of racism on blacks in the South and Midwest between the turn of the twentieth century and World War I, and the long prehistory of white terror. In the context of this inescapable reality, popular music (particularly the blues) and black religion provide competing forms of saving grace. The conflict between the “sinners” and the “saved” within Sandy’s family provides the chief source of rising tension in the novel and its thematic focus. The conflict is finally resolved when Aunt Harriett, the “Princess of the Blues,” insists on Sandy’s continuing his education; he must, as his “dicty” Aunt Tempy might have said, “get ahead – all of us niggers are too far back in this white man’s country to let any brains go to waste!”17 In the closing passages of the novel, as Sandy walks home with his mother from a Chicago restaurant (having migrated to that city in the final chapters), they hear the congregation of a “Southern” church in a back street singing: “By an’ by when de mawnin’ comes, / Saints an’ sinners all are gathered home” (p. 298). Sandy speaks for the young Langston Hughes, on whose youth the story is partially based, in finding here a model for black aesthetic achievement. No novel had yet portrayed so successfully an “ordinary” black working-class family, revealing the extraordinary tensions and complexity of their lives, and their essential, sustaining spirituality, whether “sacred” or “profane.” And no novel had woven black popular music and dance so effectively into its story-line to help carry the major leitmotifs and themes of the novel. The result was not merely to show the origins and function of the music in small black communities across the country, but to suggest the possibility of a reading experience vaguely akin to that of listening to “folk” blues, spirituals, and early jazz.
Only a year after Hughes’s novel, another novel working in the “folk” style and liberally seasoned with blues lyrics and roustabouts appeared in the form of Arna Bontemps’s God Sends Sunday (1931), focusing on the up-and-down career of “Little Augie,” a black jockey from the South. Not surprisingly, however, Bontemps’s focus on the “disorganized” life of black vice districts and sporting circles (which he may have justified as true to his “folk” models) provoked the wrath of African American critics who considered it a confirmation of white stereotyping, a form of literary pandering. Filled with bad men and loose women, sports and prostitutes, God Sends Sunday received the same sort of criticism that McKay’s Home to Harlem had. Yet in this case, the use of primitivism and “folk types,” as Amritjit Singh has argued, does not serve to define racial identity or a basis of black nationalism as overtly as in McKay’s novel.18 What made the novel a contribution in its time was a skillful handling of dialogue and “folk humor” (as it was called at the time) presented in a straightforward and nonjudgmental style. In his review of the book for Opportunity, Sterling Brown astutely affiliated the novel with the folk ballad tradition and termed its protagonist “a genuine creation in our gallery of folk portraits.”19 The simple storytelling style and episodic development indicate that Bontemps was attempting a novelistic equivalent of folk ballads such as “Frankie and Johnny” – echoes of which Brown immediately recognized – and “low-down blues” of the sort the novelist liberally reproduces throughout the narrative.
A rarely discussed novel of the “folk,” George Wylie Henderson’s Ollie Miss (1935), attests to the continuing hold of Booker T. Washington’s gospel of work and rural self-sufficiency.20 This Bildungsroman follows the life of the poverty-stricken title character as she struggles through various forms of alienation and romantic crisis to finally acquire her own farm, on which she raises a child without the support of a man. Sexually autonomous, “masculine” in physical strength and manners, Ollie Miss achieves self-fulfillment in harmony with a collective “folk” rhythm of dignified rural labor and natural cycles that Henderson renders with a high degree of technical skill. Yet the real socio-economic structures and historical trajectory of his native region challenge Henderson’s lyric idyll, as Ollie’s “own” farm is actually a piece of her uncle’s tenant farm. Thus, an aesthetic that dignifies black “folk life” and the putative autonomy of a female heroine need not have progressive political implications – as some black authors of the 1930s themselves understood.
This understanding helps explain why some left-wing critics reacted negatively to Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction, finding in it a romantic nostalgia ignoring economic and racial exploitation. The “protest” aspects of Hurston’s fiction were perhaps too indirect and subtle for readers of the 1930s to detect, but when all is said and done, Hurston’s greatest accomplishment remains her extraordinary command of language, her success in dramatically transforming the uses of literary “dialect” and its relation to narrative voice. Hurston came up with the sort of “speakerly text,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called it, that moves easily between “authentic” Southern black dialogue and the “free indirect discourse” of the narrative voice.21 For African American prose narrative, her achievement was the literary equivalent of the Great Migration, dependent not only on her rural Southern background but on the opportunities she seized in the intellectual phantasmagoria of Manhattan.
In view of the common belief that publishers had lost interest in black authors with the onset of the Depression, it is worth pointing out that Hurston wrote her first novel only after an editor at J. B. Lippincott, impressed by one of her short stories, asked if she was working on a novel. The query prompted her to go back to her native Florida and start writing one. Jonah’s Gourd Vine was accepted for publication four months later, in October 1933. In this Bildungsroman centered on the life of John Pearson, a poor and fatherless “yellow” boy become preacher and philanderer, Hurston the anthropologist and folklore collector is not yet thoroughly fused with the storyteller and modern novelist, but all the basic ingredients are laid out for one of the major developments in black fiction. Frequently suggesting African origins for the spirituality, music, and preacher’s role she features throughout the book, Hurston’s overriding purpose, as John Lowe identifies it, is “to show the world the glory of African American folklore and language and the central role it plays in sustaining the community.”22 Notably, for Hurston this function has almost completely displaced that of rescuing the “image of the Negro” from stereotypes or directly protesting racial oppression.
Another Bildungsroman, this time of a black woman, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) shows the complete fusion of the competing strains (of voice, narrative strategy, and point of view) so noticeably unreconciled in the first novel. Hurston’s personal background and infallible ear, her training in anthropology, her fearlessness, her belief in the power of African American expressive culture, all combined to produce voices previously unheard in American literature. Those voices saturate the “free indirect style” of her narrative voice and, simultaneously, provide one of her greatest themes:
It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.23
Never mind that at the moment, the talkers were casting aspersions on – indeed, deliberately scapegoating – Hurston’s heroine. Hurston, an individualist to the core, was not one to sweep away contradictory aspects of “the black community”; communities are, by nature, double-edged necessities, and Hurston herself, it seems, always lived between them. Critics will long debate Hurston’s politics and the nature of her feminism. Her ability to hear the unheard and “inappropriate,” her view of self-revelation as the “oldest human longing” – a belief only available to an author of the broadest sympathies – makes her the most unruly novelist of the Negro Renaissance. It is not surprising that, of all the black novelists of the “renaissance” generation who aspired to write a “white novel,” Hurston was the first to complete and publish one: Seraph on the Suwanee (1948).
While several writers thought of the “folk” as the authentic origin of a black modernist aesthetic, as David G. Nicholls has argued, the “folk” concept is as much a product of modern race consciousness as its historical origin.24 It thus serves as a kind of medium or metaphor through which authors coming from different ideological, geographical, social, and aesthetic positions compete in the struggle to define a modern collective project for racial advance. The tension between black authors’ approaches to the “folk,” then, attests to the emergence of a field of literary discourse that had been, before 1923, comparatively one-dimensional and confining – and overwhelmingly circumscribed by conventions developed in white-authored novels. Richard Wright would dismiss Hurston as a romantic of backward political orientation, but both the quality of his own early fiction and its favorable reception would have been inconceivable without her example, and that of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. One thinks especially of Wright’s novellas collected in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), the pivot between the Negro Renaissance and what was to come.
An important strain in several novels of the Negro Renaissance is a self-conscious critique of the “Negro vogue.” One main character in Nigger Heaven complains, “Now the white editors are beginning to regard Negroes as interesting novelties, like white elephants or black roses”; other characters deride the white vogue for Harlem nightclubs that has even led some clubs to exclude black patrons. Major characters mock the idea of Harlem as a “mecca” of the New Negro and the notion that artists and writers can break the bars of racial exclusion: “Of course, Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes and Countee Cullen can go anywhere within reason. They will be invited to white dinner parties, but I don’t see how that’s going to affect the rest of us.”25 Fisher, similarly, satirizes the notion that “social mixing” will overcome racism, aims bitter sarcasm toward notions of black “primitivism,” and makes fun of white editors who enthuse about “the ‘wealth of material’ to be found in Negro Harlem,” or who jump to praise anything written by a Negro, as long as it has some element of the “African” in it.26 Such critiques also play an important role in Claude McKay’s Banjo, Nella Larsen’s Passing, George Schuyler’s Black No More, and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. . . . Satire on the “vogue of the Negro” was not merely a retrospective phenomenon but an essential feature of the “renaissance” itself.
Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry . . . (1929), centering on the experiences of lonely, dark-skinned Emma Lou Morgan, mercilessly attacks intraracial “colorism” and classism, and in the process realistically exposes the deteriorating conditions in “renaissance” Harlem, where the latter half of the novel takes place. Here, outside the comfortable homes of the elite, the mass of people struggle to find and keep work in order to pay for miserable tenement rooms and to divert themselves in cheap theaters or public dance halls where, it seems, everyone is “on the make” and no one, including Emma Lou, finds black to be beautiful – Negro vogue or not. The only people who rise above such prejudices – the young “New Negro” writers and artists to whom she is introduced – are themselves crippled by self-doubt and detached by temperament and training from the “common people” they admire.
Capping the cynicism of Thurman’s novel, in Black No More (1931) George Schuyler, the most skeptical of all black authors about the notion of a “Negro renaissance,” takes broad aim at the multifaceted American racial discourse of the era and all the “scams” dependent on it (in Schuyler’s view), including white supremacy and “Negro uplift” as well as the literary Renaissance itself. The two great driving forces of American culture (and perhaps all culture), in Schuyler’s novel, are greed and sexual desire – and they are deeply intertwined at the racial border. The origin of American racial institutions, according to Schuyler, lay in economic history going back to the early years of American settlement, when “race-mixing” had to be repressed – or, where it could not be repressed, disavowed – to preserve a slave system dependent on racial distinction. Thus race became one of the major integuments of the capitalist system in the United States, and the sites of the disavowed yet pervasive racial “mixture” that characterized the nation displayed all the characteristics of both commodity fetishism, in the Marxian sense, and sexual fetishism, in the Freudian sense. Racial distinction became a source of economic gain and erotic fantasy while the actual extent of “miscegenation” was hidden behind the luster of racial purity.
The novel’s dual plot structure follows, on the one hand, the attempts of Max Disher (an “ex-colored man”) to connect with the white Helen Givens (daughter of the head of the Knights of Nordica) and, on the other, the social and political effects of Dr. Junius Crookman’s invention, “Black No More.” The first story is a classic comic romance, with the romantic couple blocked by hereditary institutions but finally united as the nucleus of a new configuration. The second has no true resolution but, in the mode of political satire, stresses the abstract design of incidents to achieve a concentration of irony and sarcasm. At the end of the novel Crookman becomes Surgeon General of the United States – a particularly ironic denouement in view of the era’s concerns about “race hygiene” – and the American social and political landscape have been transformed, but not necessarily for the better. A satirist to the end, Schuyler does not offer a successful antidote to the absurdities of American race-thinking but rather revels in them while exploding the genealogical narratives that undergird notions of “tradition” and “purity.”
In his roman-à-clef, Infants of the Spring (1932), Wallace Thurman revived several figures from his first novel and thrashed out many of the cultural debates that exercised the “Harlem school” of New Negro authors while coming to a bleak conclusion about the nature of the “renaissance” and, more broadly, the future of black culture. Debilitating black self-doubt, condescending white patronage, self-destructive Bohemianism, gay sexual ambivalence, interracial misunderstanding, and class conflict all combine to nip the hopes of cultural rebirth in the bud, as the title borrowed from Hamlet suggests. Infants of the Spring is a painful novel to read, not so much because of its satirical treatment of the Negro Renaissance as because of its own failure to rise above the kind of adolescent self-consciousness it projects onto a movement far broader and more firmly grounded than what it portrays. Thurman’s self-consciousness, that is, about being one of the “avant-garde” – along with his purported disdain for all things held sacred by both the bourgeoisie and the rabble (an attitude much beholden to the model of H. L. Mencken) – causes him to generalize the dysfunctions of a small clique housed in “Niggerati manor” to the fate of African American literature and art generally. The strongest passage in all Thurman’s fiction can be found in the novel’s conclusion, in which he describes a drawing by Paul Arbian of
an inky black skyscraper, modeled after Niggerati Manor, . . . on which were focused an array of blindingly white beams of light. The foundation of this building was composed of crumbling stone. At first glance it could be ascertained that the skyscraper would soon crumble and fall, leaving the dominating white lights in full possession of the sky.
This passage is most often interpreted as an epitaph to the Negro Renaissance. Thurman may have so intended it, but in reality it was the exemplary gesture of a broader movement toward the somewhat limited phenomenon better termed “the Negro vogue.”
Probably the most important novel of the 1920s in connecting the “American” dimensions of the Negro Renaissance with black culture globally was Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929).27 Forming a kind of “pendant” with Home to Harlem, this picaresque tale brings many of the thematic concerns and techniques of the former novel to bear on the more international black context of “the Ditch” in Marseilles, the squalid quarter inhabited by itinerant working-class men of all races, and, more notably for the Jamaican McKay, black working-class men of all nations. The novel showcases debates about various forms of pan-Africanism by a broad array of workingmen and drifters, but also reintroduces Ray of Home to Harlem as the self-conscious “intellectual” who allows McKay to enunciate his own positions on black art, as in the earlier novel. Through Ray, too, McKay answers the critics of that work and deliberately rejects any concern about a racially “dual” audience:
I think about my race as much as you . . . but if I am writing a story – well, it’s like all of us in this place here, black and brown and white, and I telling a story for the love of it. Some of you will listen, and some won’t. If I am a real story-teller, I won’t worry about the differences in complexion of those who listen and those who don’t, I’ll just identify myself with those who are really listening and tell my story.28
The novel places its hopes for the future of the race in the “primitive” blacks of all nations who remain in touch with their “native roots.” Lacking any sort of social or economic power, these men perform political resistance unself-consciously through everyday cultural practices, descended from African traditions, in the interstices of national formations. Several set-pieces render storytelling, music, and dance performed by men from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States to reveal continuities in black diasporic cultures, adapted to the specific circumstances of life in different geographies. A “biological kinship to the swell of primitive earth life” saves lower-class blacks from being completely deadened and integrated into the machine civilization that has enervated the white proletariat. Here the “primitive” is not the antithesis of the “modern” but a kind of participation in the rhythms of life that grounds what McKay regards as true “culture.” By the same token, the language of the men of “the Ditch” retains a vitality and artistic edge that keeps up with the real conditions of modern life. Banjo offers a striking argument about who constitutes the linguistic vanguard in the era of high modernist poetics. Similarly, doubting the Leninist model of proletarian revolution, Ray has come to place his hope in the race’s ability to remain spiritually impervious to “the machine” until, perhaps, the machine “stopped of its own exhaustion.” The great question McKay leaves us with is whether the uncommon common people of the black diaspora can preserve their “primitive birthright” in future generations.
It should not be surprising to find an almost diametrically opposed notion of third-world race-based politics in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1929). Du Bois’s long-standing belief in the need for an intellectual–political vanguard composed of the “Talented Tenth” of subaltern peoples here combines with his belief in the world-historical role of African Americans. Weakening the international anti-imperialist movement of colored peoples at the beginning of the novel is the assumption that the movement must be led by hereditary elites, members of the traditional nobility; and this ideological weakness connects with their conviction that American blacks (descendants of slaves) are cowardly, intellectually inferior, and politically docile. Matthew Towns, however, inspires them, with the help of the Indian Princess Kautilya, to recognize the virtue of democratic idealism (the one thing of value that “America” has given the world), of building the revolutionary vanguard out of an aristocracy of merit rather than birth – in short, what Du Bois had years earlier termed a “Talented Tenth.”
Dedicated to “Titania XXVII” by the “Queen of Faerie,” and subtitled A Romance, the book frankly announces its fantastic quality and its generic debts.29 It is no coincidence that a form identified with feudal social structures and genteel aesthetics should serve as Du Bois’s vehicle for a political novel, as opposed to McKay’s choice of the picaresque. If McKay finds the most valid internationalism and the most salvific cultural politics for blacks in the vulgar and the “low,” Du Bois finds them in the “High Command” of the “Great Central Committee of Yellow, Brown, and Black” of the “Great Council of Darker Peoples” – something in the order of a modern Round Table, which has deliberately planned the liberation of the “darker races” to begin in 1952. Du Bois’s romance plot, after putting its two main characters – Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India, and Matthew Towns of rural Prince James County, Virginia – through the trials and tribulations necessary for full political enlightenment and indestructible moral resolve, ecstatically unites the darker races of the world through them, and more particularly through the birth of their son, the “Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds.” Nothing could be further from McKay’s tendencies to paganism, unconcern for long-term romantic heterosexual commitment, and locating the most authentic expressions of black political resistance in “low” aesthetic forms – the expressions of what Kautilya refers to as the “dead, sluggish, brutalized masses of men” (p. 225). While the picaresque plot of McKay’s novel ends without any true resolution, on a “realistic” note of wondering whether blacks will be able to resist the soul-deadening rationality of the “machine” civilization, “the providential nature of the romance,” as Claudia Tate points out, “facilitates Du Bois’s conscious endeavor to preserve his faith in the inevitability of racial justice.”30
The next deliberately “radical” black novel to put African American rebellion in the context of revolutionary movements of the world’s “darker races” would be Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936), partly inspired by the Scottsboro trial in Alabama and by the Indian independence movement led by Gandhi. Bontemps took for the subject of this important historical novel an aborted uprising of the “brutalized masses” – black Southern slaves – led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800. What most distinguishes Black Thunder from the African American novels of the 1920s is the turn to historical reflection on slavery and emphasis on revolutionary violence as a necessary aspect of proletarian upheaval. The thoughts of a sailor from San Domingo who looks on as the hero of the novel is taken from jail might be those of Bontemps in the era of Scottsboro and Gandhi’s rebellion: “He understood now that words like freedom and liberty drip blood – always, everywhere, there was blood on such words” (p. 196). Set in the period just after the revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in San Domingo, the novel implies clear parallels between the worldwide revolutionary currents of that era and those of the 1930s, to the extent that Bontemps’s French radicals (immigrants to the United States) speak in terms drawn straight from the left-wing lexicon of Depression-era America. But while associating the uprising with other revolutionary movements (in Ireland, France, and the Caribbean), in a clear parallel to the communist movements of his own time, Bontemps stresses that it is self-motivated and autonomous, inspired by a will to freedom and not by “white” intellectual concepts – even though Bontemps articulates the uprising’s connections to a broader radical intellectual tradition and the contemporary discourse of the “Rights of Man.” If earlier novels had begun exploring the possibilities of fiction rooted in the contemporary experiences and expression of “the folk,” Bontemps re-imagined those possibilities in the context of re-imagining black history. As Eric Sundquist has pointed out, “No one, no historian and novelist, had written so completely of the motives and barriers to revolt as though from within slave culture.”31 Bontemps’s work is an attempt to imagine a broad cross-section of African American slave culture as a potentially revolutionary proletariat, and to examine the many forces that made its potential, as well as its possible conjunction with white working-class radicalism, historically unrealizable – and thus tragically heroic.
Looking back in 1968, Bontemps considered this, his second novel, a work not of the Harlem Renaissance but rather of a succeeding period of dispersion when various Harlem Renaissance writers and leaders moved away from New York in the wake of the stock market crash. Nonetheless, many of the fundamental strategies, motifs, and patterns of African American achievement in the novel developed during the “renaissance,” even if they were not all brought to full fruition at that time. Crucial to this phenomenon and its enduring significance in African American literary history was the diversity of aims and aesthetics, of social and cultural assumptions, and of political positions adopted by the authors. Their implicit and explicit critiques of each other combined with their sense of collective identity to produce a field of discourse rather than a singular “school” or tradition. If the next generation of black novelists defined themselves against what they often called “the Harlem School,” we should remember that this is a typical modernist strategy for staking new ground; the fact remains that their work would have been inconceivable without that of their predecessors. The legacy of the Negro Renaissance is still very much alive, legible in the vast majority of black novels published in the seven decades that have followed.
1. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 168, 171. Important scholarship that has helped resurrect Fauset’s reputation includes Carolyn Wedin Sylvander’s Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1981); Deborah E. McDowell’s introduction to Plum Bun (Boston: Pandora, 1985); Thadious Davis’s Foreword to There is Confusion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Ann DuCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 86–105; and Jacquelyn Y. McLendon, The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995). See also Jane Kuenz, “The Face of America: Performing Race and Nation in Jessie Fauset’s There is Confusion,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12 (1999): 89–111.
2. Du Bois, review of The New Negro, rpt. in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Book Reviews by W. E. B. Du Bois (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thompson, 1977), pp. 78–79.
3. For discussions of responses to the novel, see Emily Bernard, “What He Did for the Race: Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance,” Soundings 80 (1997): 531–542; and Kathleen Pfeiffer’s recent introduction to the novel, in Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. ix–xxxix. I am particularly indebted to Bernard’s argument that the novel served as a catalyst of literary debate between different factions.
4. I make this argument at length in “Subject to Disappearance: Interracial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance, eds. Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 177–192.
5. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, p. 175.
6. “A Novel With a Moral,” New York Age, September 4, 1926.
7. Passing, in “Quicksand” and “Passing”, ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), p. 239.
8. For a similar position, see Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, p. 168.
9. Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho (New York: Knopf, 1928), p. 282.
10. Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932; rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 269.
11. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928; rpt. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), p. 228. On the connection between McKay’s cultural nationalism and primitivism, see especially Tracy McCabe, “The Multifaceted Politics of Primitivism in Harlem Renaissance Writing,” Soundings 80 (1997): 475–497.
12. McKay’s primitivism, as Tracy McCabe has pointed out, is politically radical but “inflected by traditional class and gender hierarchies.” Tracy McCabe, “Multifaceted Politics,” p. 492. For a critique of McKay’s sexism and classism, see also Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 738–755.
13. Du Bois, review of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, and Melville Herskovits’s, The American Negro, Crisis (June 1928), rpt. in Aptheker, ed., Book Reviews, pp. 113–115.
14. Qtd. in Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 247.
15. Langston Hughes to Claude McKay, qtd. in Cooper, Claude McKay, p. 243.
16. Qtd. in Hugh Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), p. 185.
17. Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (1930; rpt. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 298.
18. Amritjit Singh, The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–1933 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), p. 56.
19. Sterling Brown, review of God Sends Sunday, Opportunity 9 (June 1931): 181.
20. See David G. Nicholls’s discussion of Ollie Miss, to which I am much indebted, in Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 85–101.
21. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 170–216.
22. John Lowe, Jump At The Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 146.
23. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1990), pp. 1–2.
24. Conjuring the Folk, especially pp. 1–7. See also Hazel V. Carby, “Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery,” Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston,” in Michael Awkward, ed., New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 71–93.
25. Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, p. 48.
26. Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), p. 100.
27. Brent Hayes Edwards, “Three Ways to Translate the Harlem Renaissance,” Temples for Tomorrow, eds. Fabre and Feith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 304–305.
28. Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), p. 115.
29. In Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 61, Claudia Tate makes good use of M. H. Abrams’s scholarship on the romance form with reference to Dark Princess.
30. Tate, Psychoanalysis, p. 61.
31. Eric J. Sundquist, The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 99.