6
Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961)
Introduced, and Edited by Cheryl A. Wall
Harlem, the fabled cultural capital of the black world, gave its name to the awakening among Afro-American artists during the 1920s and 1930s. The Harlem Renaissance, with its outpouring of literature, art, and music, defined a new age in Afro-American cultural history. To a degree, the difference was formal; artists' explorations of vernacular culture yielded new genres of poetry and music. The transformation was, however, larger than that. Proclaiming the advent of the "New Negro" in 1925, Alain Locke argued for a revised racial identity. The migration of thousands of blacks from the rural South to northern cities reflected and produced a new race consciousness and pride. Afro-Americans had achieved at long last a spiritual emancipation, "shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority" that were slavery's legacy. Locke averred that "the day of 'aunties,' 'uncles' and 'mammies' is equally gone." Art expresses the transformation. Like the migrant masses, "shifting from countryside to city," the young black artists "hurdle several generations of experience at a leap" (Locke 4, 5).
Scholars have treated Locke's essay as a manifesto of the movement, but its argument overstates the case for male writers and contradicts the experience of many women. Zora Hurston is the outstanding exception. Some women, such as Jessie Fauset and Marita Bonner, were northern bom and bred; they knew little of the southern folk culture, and what they did know Page 156 →they had been trained to deny. Despite being bom in Atlanta and rural Virginia respectively, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Anne Spencer wrote poetry that neither spoke in the accents of the region nor represented its social reality. Moreover, their work, like Fauset's and Bonner's, reflects a strong sense that the stereotypes Locke dismissed continued to haunt. Less innovative in form and less race conscious in theme, black women's writing generally does not seem to "hurdle several generations of experience in a leap." It does, however, encode the experience of racism and sexism in more profound ways than critics have usually discerned.
Jessie Fauset, who published four novels in ten years, was among the most prolific writers of the period; she was also one of the few literary women to live in Harlem. Her fiction has rarely been considered reflective of the age. Taken as novels of manners of the black middle class, her books long consigned their author, in Robert Bone's phrase, to "the Rear Guard" of the Renaissance. Feminist critics, notably Deborah McDowell and Carolyn Syl-vander, challenge this view. Moreover, when one examines her total career as editor and journalist as well as novelist and poet, Jessie Fauset's progressive contribution to Afro-American literature in indisputable.
While teaching high school French and Latin in Washington, D.C., Fauset had begun in 1912 to submit pieces to the two-year-old Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, the sociologist and writer who is one of the towering figures in twentieth-century American intellectual history, the Crisis soon became the most influential black periodical in the country. Jessie Fauset became literary editor in 1919, the year the Crisis circulation reached the 100,000 mark. Fauset's arrival on staff thus coincided with the first stirrings of the Harlem Renaissance. Under her direction, the Crisis gained a reputation for literary excellence that paralleled its eminence in social and political affairs.
Jessie Fauset made the decision to publish Langston Hughes's first poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." In his memoir The Big Sea Hughes acknowledged her steadfast support of him and others when he named her along with Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson as one who "midwifed the Negro Renaissance" into being. Fauset's attention to the careers of other young poets, notably Ama Bontemps and Jean Toomer, is documented in their memoirs and correspondence.
Particularly significant was her championing of black women writers. She promoted the work of women illustrators (Effie Lee Newsome and Laura Wheeler Waring, for example) as well as writers in the Crisis and the Brownies' Book, the ground-breaking children's magazine Fauset edited with Du Bois in 1920 and 1921. Novelist Nella Larsen first appeared in print in the Brownies' Book. Fauset gave writers other kinds of notice as well. When she reviewed The Book of American Negro Poetry (see "As to Books," below), a pioneering volume edited by James Weldon Johnson, she cited by name only four of the thirty-two poets represented; Georgia Douglas Johnson and Anne Spencer Page 157 →were two of them. Despite the vagueness of her critical vocabulary, Fauset's judgment was sound. Spencer did in fact possess one of the most distinctive voices of the period; Johnson was the only woman to collect her poetry in book form.
Among the other significant volumes Fauset reviewed were the first books by Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes (her reviews are reprinted below), as well as the first book Claude McKay published in the United States (see "As to Books"). By any reckoning, these men are major poets of the Harlem Renaissance. They are also strikingly dissimilar in their approach to their craft. Fauset's critical acumen enabled her to identify the strengths in each man's work, though she was clearly more comfortable with the traditional poetics to which Cullen and McKay adhered. Of McKay's Harlem Shadows she could proclaim without reservation, “this is poetry!" By contrast, when writing about Hughes's The Weary Blues, Fauset was careful to state that she was "no great lover of dialect," and she was rather too eager to place Hughes's work in the context of Western literary tradition. Certainly, her assertion that Hughes was not preoccupied with form is mistaken; Hughes's experiments with vernacular forms such as spirituals, blues, and jazz are now regarded as building blocks of Afro-American modernism. Yet, with all her temporizing, Fauset reached a conclusion from which few of Hughes's many subsequent critics would demur: "I doubt if any one will ever write more tenderly, more understandingly, more humorously of the life of Harlem shot through as it is with mirth, abandon and pain." The tolerance for literary innovation exemplified here places Fauset in sharp contrast to Du Bois, whose literary values could be as reactionary as his politics were progressive.
Fauset's Crisis writings are diverse and numerous. She wrote on educational themes, sketching the lives of heroic blacks in different societies, and on drama and other cultural subjects. She reported regularly on black women activists, such as those organized in the National Organization of Colored Women. Widely traveled and fluent in several languages, Fauset translated and reviewed literature from Africa and the Caribbean. She also became increasingly skilled in the art of reportage, as the essays recounting her extensive travel abroad demonstrate.
A lifelong Francophile, Fauset noted appreciatively the absence of petty racism in France. As she told the Paris Tribune in 1925, "I am colored and wish to be known as colored, but sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country. And so—but only temporarily—I have fled from it" (quoted in Benstock 13). Although she was well aware of the white American expatriate community, she had little contact with its members. They were, she felt, uninterested in meeting her. Referring to the proprietor of Shakespeare & Company, Fauset remarked, "Miss Beach has never acknowledged my note" (quoted in Lewis 124).
To an admirable degree, Fauset broadened her travel and her political concerns beyond the orbit of her peers. In 1921 she reported on the meetings Page 158 →in London, Brussels, and Paris of the Pan-African Congress, an organization Du Bois helped lead. These meetings were an important forum for the anticolonial effort; Fauset's "What Europe Thought of the Pan-African Congress" provided rare notice of women's role in the movement. Fauset also wrote accounts of her visits to North Africa. While not entirely free of racial stereotyping, these essays offer vivid representations of life in Algiers and Egypt. At a time when many Afro-Americans were fascinated by the idea of Africa, Fauset was one of a very few who actually set foot on the continent.
Issues of race and gender are major concerns in Fauset's fiction. Adhering to principles she adumbrated in her reviews, she claimed that her novels were not propagandistic. Neither, she averred, were they constrained by issues of race. Both claims are false in precisely the same way her observation that McKay did not write propaganda was false. Fauset believed that Afro-American writers had a role to play in the political struggle; they had a duty, as she put it in a wide-ranging interview in 1932, to "tell the truth about us." But she thought Afro-American writers discharged this duty best when they wrote skillfully and truthfully.
Fauset did not find a fictional form conducive to the truth she wanted to tell. There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933) are all sentimental novels. The plots often strain credulity, and their resolutions are uniformly happy: the still courageous but chastened heroine finds happiness with a protective yet more understanding hero. Yet, as McDowell has noted, Fauset's novels use literary and social conventions partly as a "deflecting mask for her more challenging concerns" ("Neglected Dimension" 87). The clichés of the marriage plot and the "passing" novel notwithstanding, Plum Bun (see the excerpt below) reveals a sophisticated understanding about the politics of race and gender. Fauset's protagonist, Angela Murray, is aware of the hierarchical arrangement of race and gender relations, but she is naive about their implications. Her creator was not.
The foreword to The Chinaberry Tree (also printed below), the most cogent statement of Fauset's personal aesthetic, has often been cited and frequently censured as a betrayal of a racial birthright. The weaknesses inherent in Fauset's position are clear; the racial defensiveness is palpable. Yet Fauset's "breathing-spells, in-between spaces where colored men and women work and love," may in fact be comparable to Hurston's renderings of the Eatonville store porch whose "sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long" (Hurston 9-10). On the porch Hurston's characters cease to be mules and become men and women. For Hurston such "in-between spaces" are inscribed by cultural differences; Fauset emphasizes commonality. Taken in tandem, the fiction of these two women explores the multidimensional experiences of Afro-Americans.
In this regard, Fauset's refusal to write about the kinds of characters and situations white readers expected and her insistence that all the drama in Page 159 →Afro-American life did not revolve around interracial conflict are important. Indeed, they are part of a larger effort waged by black women writers collectively to create a space in which they could tell their own stories.
WORKS CITED
- Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.
- Fauset, Jessie. The Chinaberry Tree. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1931.
- _____. Comedy: American Style. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1933.
- _____. Plum Bun. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929.
- _____. There Is Confusion. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924.
- _____. "What Europe Thought of the Pan-African Congress." Crisis December 1921:60-69.
- Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. New York: Knopf, 1940.
- Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1978.
- Lewis, David L. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981.
- Locke, Alain.. "The New Negro." The New Negro. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1968, 3-16.
- McDowell, Deborah. Introduction to Fauset, Plum Bun. London: Pandora P, 1985.
- _____. "The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Fauset." In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, 86-104. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
- Starkey, Marion. "Jessie Fauset." Southern Workman May 1932:217-220.
- Sylvander, Carolyn. Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Author. Troy, N.Y: Whitson, 1981.
As to Books
THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY. Chosen and edited by James Weldon Johnson. Harcourt, Brace, and Co., New York.
HARLEM SHADOWS. Claude McKay. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York.
BIRTHRIGHT. T. S. Stribling. The Century Co., New York.
WHITE AND BLACK. H. A. Shands. Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York.
CARTER AND OTHER PEOPLE. Don Marquis. Appleton and Co., New York.
NEGRO FOLK RHYMES. Thomas W. Talley. Macmillan Co., New York.
THE NEGRO PROBLEM. Compiled by Julia E. Johnsen. H. W. Wilson Co., New York.
One of the poets whom James Weldon Johnson quotes in his "Book of American Negro Poetry," himself defines unconsciously the significance of this collection. This poet, Charles Bertram Johnson, after noting in the development of Negro Poets "the greater growing reach of larger latent power", declares:
We wait our Lyric Séer,
By whom our wills are caught.
Page 160 →Who makes our cause and wrong
The motif of his song;
Who sings our racial good,
Bestows us honor's place,
The cosmic brotherhood
Of genius—not of race.
Not all of the 32 poets quoted here give evidence of this cosmic quality, but there is a fair showing, notably Mrs. Georgia Douglas Johnson whose power however is checked by the narrowness of her medium of expression, Claude McKay and Anne Spencer. Of Claude McKay I shall speak later, but I wonder why we have not heard more of Anne Spencer. Her art and its expression are true and fine; she blends a delicate mysticism with a diamond clearness of exposition, and her subject matter is original.
This anthology itself has the value of an arrow pointing the direction of Negro genius, but the author's preface has a more immediate worth. It is not only a graceful bit of expository writing befitting a collection of poetry, but it affords a splendid compendium of the Negro's artistic contributions to America. Mr. Johnson feels that the Negro is the author of the only distinctively American artistic products. He lists his gifts as follows: Folk-tales such as we find in the Joel Chandler Harris collection; the Spirituals; the Cakewalk and Ragtime. What is still more important is the possession on the part of the Negro of what Mr. Johnson calls a "transfusive quality", that is the ability to adopt the original spirit of his milieu into something "artistic and original, which yet possesses the note of universal appeal."
The first thought that will flash into the mind of the reader of "Harlem Shadows" will be: "This is poetry!" No other later discovery, a slight unevenness of power, a strange rhythm, the fact of the author's ancestry, will be able to affect that first evaluation. Mr. McKay possesses a deep emotionalism, a perception of what is fundamentally important to mankind everywhere—love of kind, love of home, and love of race. He is extraordinarily vivid in depicting these last two. "Flameheart" and "My Mother" fill even the casual reader with a sense of longing for home and the first, fine love for parents. The warmth and sweetness of those days described in the former poem are especially alluring; the mind is caught by the concept of the poinsettia's redness as the eye is fixed by a flash of color. But Mr. McKay's nobler effort has been spent in the poems of which "America" (quoted in this issue's Looking Glass) is the finest example. He has dwelt in fiery, impassioned language on the sufferings of his race. Yet there is no touch of propaganda. This is the truest mark of genius.
Max Eastman prefaces these poems with a thoughtful and appreciative foreword.
The publishers of "Birthright" could hardly have realized how correctly they were writing when they spoke of it as an "amazing book". Amazing it is in every sense of the word and in no way more than in its contradictions. The story is that of a colored boy, Peter Siner, who after leaving "Hooker's Bend" for four Page 161 →years of Harvard comes back to his own special "Niggertown" and surrenders to its environment. That is his birthright.
The style of the book is really unusual, the author clearly knows how to delineate his characters and how to write an absorbing story. But he does not care how many fallacies he introduces. Here is a boy brave and far-visioned enough to pick himself up out of the ruck and mire and to get away to the very best of intellectual and aesthetic life only to yield on his return to the worst features of it. This hardly seems likely. But while Mr. Stribling fails in depicting his hero, it is probable that he has been successful in limning his subordinate characters. One is struck forcibly by the meanness and shallowness of life in Hooker's Bend and its menacing "Niggertown", its sordid whites and shiftless Negroes. One is hard put to it to decide which race appeals to him least. "Something rotten" indeed has crept into the national idea which permits the existence of conditions like these.
Mr. Shands' "White and Black" leaves one not quite so angry as does "Birthright", but infinitely more depressed. Written in an unusually poor style, this story lacks the speciousness and sophistication of Mr. Stribling's art and for that very reason seems somehow more sincere. These white and black Texans live a life unspeakably revolting, mean, sordid and petty. The one redeeming character, "Mr. Will", even at his best is patronizing in his dealings with Negroes; at his worst he is as autocratic as a man of fewer altruistic pretentions. Over and through every manifestation of life in this town seeps the miasma of immorality, of illicit sexual relations. The whites do not respect the blacks because they are black and nobodies. The blacks do not respect the whites because they are white and are still nobodies. The colored girl Sally, the cleverest person in the book, estimates correctly enough the resistance of the white boy who has just joined church and that of the Negro who is a minister of the gospel, and she acts accordingly. It is not surprising that the author introduces into these surroundings a lynching and a procession of the Ku Klux Klan. Such surroundings breed such phenomena.
From a sociological standpoint these two books may be viewed as a step forward in the relationship of the races. They may be cited too as good examples of the realistic school; especially is this true in "White and Black" and in the portions of "Birthright" devoted to a description of "Niggertown". Finally as a commentary on the uses of American life they are drastic, most unpleasant, but valuable.
Among a number of interesting, well-written but pessimistic stories Don Marquis introduces one called "Carter", presenting an aspect of the Negro problem which I confess I have never seen manifested. "Carter" is a mulatto who can easily be taken for white. He comes North to work and usually poses as a white man. His blood rather than his actual color is his bane however. Not content with being seven-eighths Caucasian, of having the appearance of a Caucasian and therefore of enjoying the advantages of a Caucasian, his life becomes a dreary burden because he is not a Caucasian. So deep is his dislike for his black Page 162 →blood, that not only is he forced to admit his admixture to his white fiancée, but when she shows her indifference to this fact, "the seven-eighths of blood which was white spoke: 'By God! I can't have anything to do with a woman who would marry a nigger!' "
I told this story to a colored school girl. Her reaction to it was hardly what the author, I imagine, would have expected. She said inimitably: "Gee but don't white people just hate themselves!"
In his carefully compiled volume of "Negro Folk Rhymes", Professor Talley gives us a new aspect of Negro life which is by a strange contradiction both disappointing and interesting. It is easy to mark in the collection the finger of the scientific investigator rather than that of the poet; for viewed from the standpoint of beauty these songs fail to satisfy, but from the standpoint of sociology they are both valuable and enlightening. They show the pathetic narrowness and drabness of the slave's outlook, his pitiful desire to get the better even if only in fancy of his environment and of his oppressors, and so he chuckles:
Dem white folks set up in a Dinin' Room
An' dey charve dat mutton an' lam'.
De Nigger, he set 'hind de kitchen door,
An' he eat up de good sweet ham.
Dem white folks, dey set up an' look so fine,
An' dey eats dat old cow meat;
But de Nigger grin an' he don't say much,
Still he know how to git what's sweet.
In seeking compensation for his lot, he dwells on other unsuccessful creatures whose very failure to measure up to norms of beauty marks a kinship of suffering. "There are others" he declares:
Nev' min' if my nose are flat,
An' my face are black an' sooty;
De Jaybird hain't so big in song,
An' de Bullfrog, hain't no beauty.
Certain salient characteristics of the Negro are traceable in these songs, his sense of humor, his dryness, his tendency to make fun of himself and above all his love for the sudden climax which Mr. James Weldon Johnson mentions in the preface to his anthology. This seems to me a perfect example:
She writ me a letter
As long as my eye.
An' she say in dat letter:
"My Honey!—Good-bye!"
Professor Talley seems to have done for the Negro Folk Song what Mr. Johnson has done for poems by Negro authors, and like Mr. Johnson's preface Page 163 →not the least valuable part of Professor Talley's service lies in the "Study of Negro Folk Rhymes" which is appended to his book. Here he distinguishes between Rhyme Dance Songs and Dance Rhymes; he points out that the composition of these songs really served to keep the slave mentally fit, and most important of all he shows that these effusions often formed a sort of cipher language perfectly intelligible to the slaves but meaningless to their masters. Without doubt we are indebted to Professor Talley for an extraordinarily valuable sociological contribution.
In her explanatory note Miss Johnsen writes: "Selections have been chosen from both white and Negro writers, from opposers and sympathizers of the Negro alike, yet with the aim not so much to maintain exact balance as to give expression to views that reflect representative opinions and conditions of race friction, and that serve best to indicate the way for constructive effort."
This program has been successfully carried out, with the result that the book shows no bias and so should form a valuable compendium for the student or debater. Although very nearly every aspect of Negro life with relation to America has been touched upon, latter-day conditions which make the present Negro problem are considerably more emphasized than such remote subjects as slavery or abolition. This seems a wise and sensible procedure. What the true student of the problem will most treasure is the long and thorough bibliography with which Miss Johnsen prefaces her selections. This is a gold mine in itself.
Crisis, June 1922:66-68.
Reviews of Countee Cullen and
Langston Hughes
COLOR, A BOOK OF VERSE. By Countee Cullen. Harper & Brothers, New York. 1925. 108 pages.
Color is the name of Mr. Cullen's book and color is rightly, in every sense its prevailing characteristic. For not only does every bright glancing line abound in color but it is also in another sense the yard-stick by which all the work in this volume is to be measured. Thus his poems fall into three categories: Those, and these are very few, in which no mention is made of color; those in which the adjectives "black" or "brown" or "ebony" are deliberately introduced to show that the type which the author had in mind was not white; and thirdly the poems which arise out of the consciousness of being a "Negro in a day like this" in America.
These last are not only the most beautifully done but they are by far the Page 164 →most significant group in the book. I refer especially to poems of the type of "Yet do I Marvel", "The Shroud of Color", "Heritage" and "Pagan Prayer". It is in such work as this that the peculiar and valuable contribution of the American colored man is to be made to American literature. For any genuine poet black or white might have written "Oh for a Little While be Kind" or the lines to "John Keats"; the idea contained in a "Song of Praise" was used long ago by an old English poet and has since been set to music by Roger Quilter. But to pour forth poignantly and sincerely the feelings which make plain to the world the in-nemess of the life which black men live calls for special understanding. Cullen has packed into four illuminating lines the psychology of colored Americans, that strange extra dimension which totally artificial conditions have forced into a sharp reality. He writes:
All day long and all night through,
One thing only must I do:
Quench my pride and cool my blood,
Lest 1 perish in the flood.
That is the new expression of a struggle now centuries old. Here I am convinced is Mr. Cullen's forte; he has the feeling and the gift to express coloredness in a world of whiteness. I hope he will not be deflected from continuing to that of which he has made such a brave and beautiful beginning. I hope that no one crying down "special treatment" will turn him from his native and valuable genre. There is no "universal treatment"; it is all specialized. When Kipling spoke of having the artist to
"paint the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are",
he set the one infallible rule by which all workmanship should be conceived, achieved and judged. In a time when it is the vogue to make much of the Negro's aptitude for clownishness or to depict him objectively as a serio-comic figure, it is a fine and praiseworthy act for Mr. Cullen to show through the interpretation of his own subjectivity the inner workings of the Negro soul and mind.
THE WEARY BLUES. A Book of Verse. By Langston Hughes. Alfred A. Knopf. New York. 1926.109 pages.
Very perfect is the memory of my first literary acquaintance with Langston Hughes. In the unforgettable days when we were publishing The Brownies' Book we had already appreciated a charming fragile conceit which read:
Page 165 →Out of the dust of dreams,
Fairies weave their garments;
Out of the purple and rose of old memories,
They make purple wings.
No wonder we find them such marvelous things.
Then one day came "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". I took the beautiful dignified creation to Dr. Du Bois and said: "What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like that and yet is unknown to us?" And I wrote and found him to be a Cleveland high school graduate who had just gone to live in Mexico. Already he had begun to assume that remote, so elusive quality which permeaates most of his work. Before long we had the pleasure of seeing the work of the boy, whom we had sponsored, copied and recopied in journals far and wide. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" even appeared in translation in a paper printed in Germany.
Not very long after Hughes came to New York and not long after that he began to travel and to set down the impressions, the pictures, which his sensitive mind had registered of new forms of life and living in Holland, in France, in Spain, in Italy and in Africa.
His poems are warm, exotic and shot through with color. Never is he preoccupied with form. But this fault, if it is one, has its corresponding virtue, for it gives his verse, which almost always is imbued with the essence of poetry, the perfection of spontaneity. And one characteristic which makes for this bubblinglike charm is the remarkable objectivity which he occasionally achieves, remarkable for one so young, and a first step toward philosophy. Hughes has seen a great deal of the world, and this has taught him that nothing matters much but life. Its forms and aspects may vary, but living is the essential thing. Therefore make no bones about it,—"make the most of what you too may spend".
Some consciousness of this must have been in him even before he began to wander for he sent us as far back as 1921:
"Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake your brown feet, chile,
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake 'em swift and wil'— . . .
Sun's going down this evening—
Might never rise no mo’.
The sun's going down this very night—
Might never rise no mo'—
So dance with swift feet, honey,
(The banjo's sobbing low). . .
The sun's going down this very night
Might never rise no mo’."
Now this is very significant, combining as it does the doctrine of the old Biblical exhortation, "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow ye die", Horace's "Carpe diem", the German "Freut euch des Lebens" and Herrick's "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may". This is indeed a universal subject served Negro-style and though I am no great lover of any dialect I hope heartily that Mr. Hughes will give us many more such combinations.
Mr. Hughes is not always the calm philosopher; he has feeling a-plenty and is not ashamed to show it. He "loved his friend" who left him and so taken up is Page 166 →he with the sorrow of it all that he has no room for anger or resentment. While I do not think of him as a protagonist of color,—he is too much the citizen of the world for that—, I doubt if any one will ever write more tenderly, more under-standingly, more humorously of the life of Harlem shot through as it is with mirth, abandon and pain. Hughes comprehends this life, has studied it and loved it. In one poem he has epitomized its essence:
Does a jazz-band ever sob?
They say a jazz-band’s gay.
Yet as the vulgar dancers whirled
And the wan night wore away,
One said she heard the jazz-band sob
When the little dawn was grey.
Harlem is undoubtedly one of his great loves; the sea is another. Indeed all life is his love and his work a brilliant, sensitive interpretation of its numerous facets.—
Crisis, March 1926:238-239.
Foreword to The Chinaberry Tree
Nothing,—and the Muses themselves would bear witness to this,—has ever been farther from my thought than writing to establish a thesis. Colored people have been the subjects which I have chosen for my novels partly because they are the ones I know best, partly because of all the other separate groups which constitute the American cosmogony none of them, to me, seems so naturally endowed with the stuff of which chronicles may be made. To be a Negro in America posits a dramatic situation. The elements of the play fall together involuntarily; they are just waiting for Fate the Producer to quicken them into movement,—for Chance the Prompter to interpret them with fidelity.
The mere juxtaposition of the races brings into existence this fateful quality. But of course there are breathing-spells, in-between spaces where colored men and women work and love and go their ways with no thought of the "problem." What are they like then? ... So few of the other Americans know.
In the story of Aunt Sal, Laurentine, Melissa and the Chinaberry Tree I have depicted something of the homelife of the colored American who is not being pressed too hard by the Furies of Prejudice, Ignorance and Economic Injustice. And behold he is not so very different from any other American, just distinctive. He is not rich but he moves in a society which has its spheres and alignments as definitely as any other society the world over. He is simple as Page 167 →befits one whose not too remote ancestors were connected with the soil, yet his sons and daughters respond as completely as do the sons and daughters of European settlers to modem American sophistication. He has seen, he has been the victim of many phases of immorality but he has his own ideas about certain "Thou shalt nots." And acts on them.
Finally he started out as a slave but he rarely thinks of that. To himself he is a citizen of the United States whose ancestors came over not along with the emigrants in the Mayflower, it is true, but merely a little earlier in the good year, 1619. His forebears are to him quite simply the early settlers who played a pretty large part in making the land grow. He boasts no Association of the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, but he knows that as a matter of fact and quite inevitably his sons and daughters date their ancestry back as far as any. So quite as naturally as his white compatriots he speaks of his "old" Boston families, "old Philadelphians," "old Charlestonians." And he has a wholesome respect for family and education and labor and the fruits of labor. He is still sufficiently conservative to lay a slightly greater stress on the first two of these four.
Briefly he is a dark American who wears his joy and rue very much as does the white American. He may wear it with some differences but it is the same joy and the same rue.
So in spite of other intentions I seem to have pointed a moral.
The Chinaberry Tree. New York: Frederick Stokes, 1931. ix-x.
From Plum Bun
CHAPTER I
Fifth Avenue is a canyon; its towering buildings dwarf the importance of the people hurrying through its narrow confines. But Fourteenth Street is a river, impersonally flowing, broad-bosomed, with strange and devious craft covering its expanse. To Angela the famous avenue seemed but one manifestation of living, but Fourteenth Street was the rendezvous of life itself. Here for those first few weeks after her arrival in New York she wandered, almost prowled, intent upon the jostling shops, the hurrying, pushing people, above all intent upon the faces of those people with their showings of grief, pride, gaiety, greed, joy, ambition, content. There was little enough of this last. These men and women were living at a sharper pitch of intensity than those she had observed in Philadelphia. The few coloured people whom she saw were different too; they possessed an independence of carriage, a purposefulness, an assurance in their manner that pleased her. But she could not see that any of these people, black or white, were any happier than those whom she had observed all her life.
Page 168 →But she was happier; she was living on the crest of a wave of excitement and satisfaction which would never wane, never break, never be spent. She was seeing the world, she was getting acquainted with life in her own way without restrictions or restraint; she was young, she was temporarily independent, she was intelligent, she was white. She remembered an expression "free, white and twenty-one,"—this was what it meant then, this sense of owning the world, this realization that other things being equal, all things were possible. "If I were a man," she said," I could be president," and laughed at herself for the "if" itself proclaimed a limitation. But that inconsistency bothered her little; she did not want to be a man. Power, greatness, authority, these were fitting and proper for men; but there were sweeter, more beautiful gifts for women, and power of a certain kind too. Such a power she would like to exert in this glittering new world, so full of mysteries and promise. If she could afford it she would have a salon, a drawing-room where men and women, not necessarily great, but real, alive, free and untrammelled in manner and thought, should come and pour themselves out to her sympathy and magnetism. To accomplish this she must have money and influence; indeed since she was so young she would need even protection; perhaps it would be better to marry ... a white man. The thought came to her suddenly out of the void; she had never thought of this possibility before. If she were to do this, do it suitably, then all that richness, all that fullness of life which she so ardently craved would be doubly hers. She knew that men had a better time of it than women, coloured men than coloured women, white men than white women. Not that she envied them. Only it would be fun, great fun to capture power and protection in addition to the freedom and independence which she had so long coveted and which now lay in her hand.
But, she smiled to herself, she had no way of approaching these ends. She knew no one in New York; she could conceive of no manner in which she was likely to form desirable acquaintances; at present her home consisted of the four walls of the smallest room in Union Square Hotel. She had gone there the second day after her arrival, having spent an expensive twenty-four hours at the Astor. Later she came to realize that there were infinitely cheaper habitations to be had, but she could not tear herself away from Fourteenth Street. It was Spring, and the Square was full of rusty specimens of mankind who sat on the benches, as did Angela herself, for hours at a stretch, as though they thought the invigorating air and the mellow sun would work some magical burgeoning on their garments such as was worked on the trees. But though these latter changed, the garments changed not nor did their owners. They remained the same, drooping, discouraged down and outers. "I am seeing life," thought Angela, "this is the way people live," and never realized that some of these people looking curiously, speculatively at her wondered what had been her portion to bring her thus early to this unsavoury company.
"A great picture!" she thought. "I'll make a great picture of these people some day and call them 'Fourteenth Street types'." And suddenly a vast sadness invaded her; she wondered if there were people more alive, more sentient to the joy, the adventure of living, even than she, to whom she would also be a "type."Page 169 → But she could not believe this. She was at once almost irreconcilably too concentrated and too objective. Her living during these days was so intense, so almost solidified, as though her desire to live as she did and she herself were so one and the same thing that it would have been practically impossible for another onlooker like herself to insert the point of his discrimination into her firm panoply of satisfaction. So she continued to browse along her chosen thoroughfare, stopping most often in the Square or before a piano store on the same street. There was in this shop a player-piano which was usually in action, and as the front glass had been removed the increased clearness of the strains brought a steady, patient, apparently insatiable group of listeners to a standstill. They were mostly men, and as they were far less given, Angela observed, to concealing their feelings than women, it was easy to follow their emotional gamut. Jazz made them smile but with a certain wistfulness—if only they had time for dancing now, just now when the mood was on them! The young woman looking at the gathering of shabby pedestrians, worn business men and ruminative errand boys felt for them a pity not untinged with satisfaction. She had taken what she wanted while the mood was on her. Love songs, particularly those of the sorrowful ballad variety brought to these unmindful faces a strained regret. But there was one expression which Angela could only half interpret. It drifted on to those listening countenances usually at the playing of old Irish and Scottish tunes. She noticed then an acuter attitude of attention, the eyes took on a look of inwardness of utter remoteness. A passer-by engrossed in thought caught a strain and at once his gait and expression fell under the spell. The listeners might be as varied as fifteen people may be, yet for the moment they would be caught in a common, almost comic nostalgia. If the next piece were jazz that particular crowd would disperse, its members going on their meditative ways, blessed or cursed with heaven knew what memories which must not to be disturbed by the strident jangling of the latest popular song.
"Homesick," Angela used to say to herself. And she would feel so, too, though she hardly knew for what,—certainly not for Philadelphia and that other life which now seemed so removed as to have been impossible. And she made notes in her sketch book to enable her some day to make a great picture of these "types" too.
Plum Bun. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929. 87-91.
