In the early 1930s, as the famed Harlem Renaissance of black cultural achievement was winding down, a new surge of African American creativity, activism, and scholarship began to flower in the South Side Chicago district. This new “Chicago Renaissance” was fueled by two unprecedented social and economic conditions: the “Great Migration,” mass movement of Southern blacks to Chicago in search of economic opportunity and perceived safety from lynch mob rule, and the crisis of the Great Depression that followed. They were fleeing the pervasive white violence and racism of the South, which kept African Americans endangered, impoverished, and dispossessed.
Over the preceding two decades, Chicago’s black population had soared; from 44,000 in 1910, the community grew to more than 230,000 by 1930. For the most part, the new migrants were confined to a rigidly segregated zone. Richard Wright called its miserable, overcrowded housing “the world of the kitchenettes.” The migrants went to work in meatpacking plants and steel mills, garment shops and private homes. After 1929, however, many people lost their jobs as the Great Depression hit the African American community hard. Out of this crisis emerged new ideas and institutions, new political activism, and a revitalized community spirit. By the early 1930s, the South Side black community began to call itself by a new name, “Bronzeville.”
Alden Bland was one of the thousands of migrants who came to Chicago from the South. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1911. Alden, his brother Edward, and his mother migrated north at the end of WW I when his father, Edward Bland Sr. brought the family to Chicago in order to evade the draft. According to Alden’s nephew, Edward Bland III (son of Edward Bland Jr. who reports having known his uncle Alden better than he knew his own father), Alden, and Edward’s mother, Philomene Murray Bland, came from a New Orleans family that passed for white. Philomene, being too dark to pass, was given to Edward Bland Sr. in a marriage arranged between her family and the Bland family. Philomene’s family origins were rarely mentioned in the Bland households, but Edward Bland III remembers his grandmother as being an extremely intelligent and resourceful woman (Interview with Edward Bland III of Smithfield, Virginia, June 20, 2005).
Alden Bland attended the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago but did not graduate from either. After the Depression, he got a job as a postal inspector, his only job but one that he hated because “it stole time from [his] writing.” However, he was well respected in his position and even honored at the White House, along with other postal inspectors, during the Johnson administration (Edward Bland III).
The whole Bland family was “quite dysfunctional,” according to Edward Bland III. Alden wrote to his editor in December of 1946 that he was “married with one son, Alden Jr.” However, he gained a reputation as quite a womanizer and was married seven times during his lifetime. There was talk as well of his having fathered an illegitimate child. His last marriage was to Dr. Alma Jones Bland, now a retired teacher and school principal living in Chicago. His son, Alden Jr. also lives in Chicago, but remains aloof from the family (Edward Bland III).
Alden and his brother, Edward Bland, were members of the South Side Writers Group “organized by Richard Wright in 1936,” of which Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, and Margaret Walker, among others, were members. In his biographical work on her, George Kent points out that Gwendolyn Brooks knew both Alden Bland and his brother Edward, a poet and critic: “Alden and Edward … patiently helped teach Henry [her husband] and me to think.” Edward Bland III remembers visits to his home from South Side artists such as Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright, and that Gwendolyn Brooks was a very good friend to his uncle Alden and his father, to whom Brooks dedicated the poem in the Introduction to Annie Allen.
Behold A Cry (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947) was Bland’s first and only published work. It was written, as Bland says, “in streetcars, on elevated trains, in wash rooms and public libraries” during the Depression while Bland worked as a porter, street-sweeper, dishwasher, salesman, and accountant. Bland took the title for the book from the Bible, Isaiah: “and he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.” Set in 1918 Chicago, the novel is among a large number of other “migration novels,” as Lawrence R. Rodgers refers to them in Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel. In Rodgers’s opinion, Behold A Cry, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, “constitute[d] a more optimistic, more nuanced perspective on migration than [its] fugitive migrant forerunners.”
Behold A Cry, which is very much an autobiographical account of the Bland family’s experiences during Alden and Edward’s childhood, fictionalizes the Great Migration experience of blacks coming from the South to the North. The narrative focuses on Ed Tyler, a black man who, like thousands of other black men, left the Mississippi Delta looking for a better life in the North. Ed has left his wife and sons behind saying that he would send for them when he has earned enough money to support them. This similarity to Alden and Edward Bland’s own family is unmistakable. The fictionalized Edward Bland Sr., Ed Tyler, is a very tall, strikingly handsome man who has become mesmerized by the high-living, nightclub, and pool-hall life, and the streetwise, classy “colored women” of Chicago’s urban ghetto. His slaughterhouse wages make it possible for him to dress stylishly and live in an apartment that he shares with his mistress.
In order to escape the draft, however, Ed Tyler (like Edward Bland Sr.) is obliged to send for his wife and sons, something that he is not anxious to do. He is “disgraced by their fresh-from-the country appearance” (12–13). He casually moves them into the apartment he shares with his mistress, Mamie. Even though Phom, his wife, is not happy with the arrangement, the living conditions seem relatively good. Ed continues to sneak off to be with Mamie, however, while trying to keep the truth of their relationship from Phom and their children (Dan and Son). Like Claude McKay in Home to Harlem, Bland succeeds in capturing the street life and the “liberating” and transforming influence it has on Ed Tyler, who radically changes from a simple country peasant to a womanizing “dandy.” Yet, unlike McKay’s work, which portrays characters submerged in drifting, ad hoc relationships and the easygoing nightlife of Harlem, Behold A Cry depicts the harsher realities for blacks in northern cities.
The novel also foregrounds the Chicago race riots of 1918 and 1919, which, in Bland’s representation, are provoked by an incident at a public beach where a young black man is killed by whites after blacks attempt to integrate a section of the beach usually off limits to them. However, murderous rioting erupted in the spring and summer of 1919 in twenty-two American cities and towns. The rioting in Chicago was among the most severe in the country. The narrative focuses on the disastrous outcomes for blacks as a result of the riots that followed when black men like Ed Tyler and his friends were used as strikebreakers. Also a focus of the narrative are the varied attitudes of blacks toward unionization:
“Crop failures, high rents, epidemics, Negroes got plenty reason for leaving the South … And there was good jobs waiting in the cities … But the war is over now. Things can’t stay like this …”
“So the union’s going to straighten all this out,” Tom said derisively.
“But where you going to find more prejudice than in unions?” Joe asked. “Now take us, in the sheepkill, here. We knife men, ain’t we? And knife men is supposed to join the Butchers.’ Can we? Hell no! All Negroes join 651, All niggers—not butchers!”(61)
In the turning point of the narrative, Ed decides to break the strike by going to work at the slaughterhouse. He is badly beaten by whites on his way home and, as he recovers, starts to feel even more trapped in his marriage and his home life. True to his unstable nature, seen throughout the novel, Ed ultimately runs away with the young wife of his protégé whom he has taken into his home. The novel ends with Phom (the fictionalized Philomene Murray Bland) and the children left to face their fate in Chicago’s South Side as she remarks that, “The old Ed [who had left her in the South] was broken to bits” (52). She fears for the future of her sons wondering: “When they come face to face with what it means to be black, what then? What happens to [their lives] after that? But how can you get a child ready for it? …”(52).
From September 1946 to April 1947, Alden Bland and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, wrote a series of letters to each other concerning Perkins’s and others’ thoughts on the novel itself, other issues relative to the book’s reception, and Bland’s potential literary career. The letters indicate that Perkins and Scribners were committed to working with Bland on promoting Behold A Cry, as well as possibly publishing other works. Bland instructed Perkins to send copies of the book to a number of influential literary people, among them Richard Wright, Sinclair Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, Frank Tannenbaum at Knopf, Lillian Smith, and Langston Hughes. Bland sent Perkins excerpts of a letter he received from William Carlos Williams about Behold A Cry. In it Williams offers glowing praise as well as advice to Bland about being a writer:
I finished your Behold A Cry last evening … I don’t think you will ever write a book that will give you greater satisfaction … I am avoiding all sorts of comments as you may guess, comments thoroughly justified by the book’s general excellence … I wish you all the courage in the world—for with your own authentic and beautifully realized materials you may, … just … raise your whole paraphernalia of personal, intimate inescapable world of thought and feeling up to a level of expression that can be truly liberating to the mind, to men and women of all races …
According to George Kent, who interviewed Alden Bland as well as reviewed the novel, Alden deferred to his brother Edward as a decisive force among the South Side Writers group. Edward Bland’s description of the black community as “pre-individualistic” is instructive and seems to have influenced Alden’s portrayal of his central character, Ed Tyler. According to Edward Bland, “ … the Negro stress is on group. Instead of seeing in terms of the individual, the Negro sees in terms of ‘races,’ masses of people separated from other masses of people according to color.” Alden’s character, Ed Tyler, articulates this “pre-individualistic” thinking to his sons after he is beaten by whites in the riots:
… Ed opened one eye. It glittered with hate.
“Look good!” he said …
“Look good!” he commanded. “Because I want you to remember what you see. Think about this when you hear all that fancy talk about white folks and how much a friend they is!”
“ … You too young to understand, I guess. But first and last, remember you a nigger. Look at me and see what it means. I’m your father, yes, but we tied together in another way. We all niggers together! That’s something special because it only happens to us … being niggers is most important of all!” (163–164)
Alain Locke makes reference to Behold A Cry in “A Critical Perspective of the Literature of the Negro for 1947” observing about the work that, “It is a novel of the personal triangle of wife, mistress and desertion as well as of the economic triangle of labor, capital and race, set in World War I Chicago,” indeed an exposé of the social realism embraced by Richard Wright and others of the South Side Writers Group. Horace Cayton labeled it “A convincing portrait of Negroes against the rising racial and labor unrest of 1918 …” and goes on to note that: “Although not outstanding, perhaps because of its failure to focus on one character that holds the reader’s sympathy, this story is convincing in its portrayal of a southern Negro’s attempt at adjustment in Chicago …”
Theodore Pratt’s review of the novel (New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, March 9, 1947) is one of the most comprehensive of those given. In “Southern Negroes in Chicago,” he characterizes the novel as “a warm human story … a novel of Negro life in which the characters are people and not stock figures …” Rosenberger continues:
His subject is one which has been little explored in American fiction: the urban Negro worker who has migrated from the South, and the accompanying personal and social tensions…. The author examines clinically the amalgam of hatred and Ignorance and suspicion which makes [Ed Tyler] and hundreds of his neighbors in the crowded Negro section more than Willing to become strike-breakers against the white workers … [The novel] has about it no sensationalism to attract an audience, but in its quiet maturity it introduces a new writer of distinction. (7).
Robert Bone gives slight mention of Behold A Cry in The Negro Novel in America by commenting that it contains “psychological subtlety” (159). Another reviewer, Robert E. Fleming, wrote that “Behold a Cry offers, among other things, an examination of the black man’s relationship with unions; it presents a black view of the major race riot that erupted in the summer of 1919 …”(75).
In one of Bland’s letters to Maxwell Perkins, he wrote that he was “interested in doing a novel of the South an open examination of what is happening to the Negro and white personality …” However, the project never came to fruition. After retirement, Bland went into real estate where he did extremely well, “becoming nearly a millionaire,” (Edward Bland III). Although Behold A Cry remains a little-known novel today, overshadowed by the works of Richard Wright and other giants of the South Side Writers group, it does merit “rediscovery” and reconsideration by students and scholars of the New Negro Renaissance in general and the Chicago Renaissance in particular.
Behold A Cry is important, as Robert E. Fleming points out, not only as “an examination of the black man’s relationship with unions” and an African American view of “the major race riot that erupted in the summer of 1919,” but also as an exposé of the transformative experience of the Great Migration and its ensuing problems for black people in 1947, as well as its consequent legacy inherited by blacks living in American ghettos today. Alden Bland died in Chicago in 1992.
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———. “Behold A Cry,” New York Times, March 23, 1947, 18.
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———. “Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy and the Ideal of Southern Folk Community.” African American Review 26, 1, Women Writers Issue (Spring 1992): 161–72.
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