CHAPTER IX

THE URBAN SCENE

The Harlem School.—Before 1925 there was little in American fiction about Negro life in northern cities. But when “the peasant moved cityward” in the great sweeps of migration, books about the urban Negro multiplied. The numbers of Negroes in northern cities grew by leaps and bounds from 1916 on. Although various cities beckoned—Pittsburgh with its steelmills, Chicago with its stockyards, Detroit with its automobile factories—it was Harlem that became the Mecca for the southern Negro, the West Indian, and the African. One historian of Harlem states that it contains more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth. Harlem became a Mecca likewise for white pleasure seekers from downtown and abroad, who, hunting the new thrill with the desperate eagerness of the post-war generation, rushed to what they considered a place of primitive abandon, of unfailing “joy of life.” Cabarets sprang up like mushrooms; putting on a big time became a major industry. In revolt against Victorian prudishness and repression, and machine-age standardization, writers and artists escaped to dark Harlem for vicarious joy, and discovered an “exotic, savage world,” only a nickel’s subway ride from the heart of an over-civilized city. The Harlem Boom was useful to Negro writers, who were influenced by the growing race-consciousness of the “greatest Negro city in the world.” Some accepted the downtown version of pagan Harlem as gospel, others put in disclaimers, but all made eager contact with the literary world.

Carl Van Vechten’sNigger Heaven(1925) was the first novel to exploit this newly discovered territory, and has remained the most influential. The author, already known for sophisticated fiction, was attracted by the high spirits and piquant contrasts of Harlem. Running through the descriptions of cabarets, wild parties, and sensational orgies is the story of Byron, an “intellectual” wastrel. He is loved by Mary, a girl superior to the fast set, but he cannot resist the wiles of Lasca, “a gorgeous brown Messalina of Seventh Avenue.” Byron’s character cracks under the strain of fast living. His last gesture is one of typical futility: in a fit of jealous and drunken rage, he empties his gun into the body of his rival, who was already dead, while the police approach.

Nigger Heavenpresented a setting and type of life that were little known to American fiction except forThe Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man. The gin-mills and cabarets, the kept men and loose ladies of Harlem’s bohemian fringe, have surface accuracy and the appeal of the unfamiliar. Van Vechten in a short space of time observed closely. But like a discoverer, he was partial to exotic singularities. That these exist does not validate the claim of the publishers that “Herein is caught the fascination and tortured ecstasies of Harlem.... The author tells the story of modern Negro life.” Modern Negro life is not inNigger Heaven; certain selected scenes to prove Negro primitivism are.

Claude McKay’sHome To Harlem(1926) has for its setting the speak-easies, buffet flats and “tonsorial parlors” of a pagan Harlem. The characters are longshoremen, dining car cooks and waiters, and members of sporting circles. Casual love affairs are their main pursuits. Jake, an ex-soldier, recently returned from the World War, meets and loses a marvelousbrown charmer on his first night in Harlem. His picaresque adventures and those of his cronies take up the rest of the book, until he finds the long-lost beauty at the end. Working conditions on the railroad are described with some grimness, butHome To Harlemlacks McKay’s sharpest protest. McKay’s nearest approach to his poetry is in the ecstatic worship with which Jake looks upon the abandon of the gay Mecca.

McKay’sBanjo(1929) is related to the Harlem school of fiction, describing the life of stevedores, tramps, sailors and panhandlers in the “Ditch” at Marseilles. Ray, a vagabond intellectual fromHome To Harlem, does much of the talking; savoring color, joy and beauty wherever he finds it, he is attracted to the primitive and violent longshoremen.

Educated Negroes ashamed of their race’s intuitive love of color ... ashamed of Congo-sounding laughter, ashamed of their complexion (bleaching out), ashamed of their strong appetites. No being ashamed for Ray. Rather than lose his soul, let intellect go to hell and live instinct!

To Ray, “A black man, even though educated, was in closer biological kinship to the swell of primitive earth life.” Anti-bourgeois and anti-imperialist, seeing the “civilized world” from the bottom, Ray is nevertheless a racialist, not a radical. And such, inBanjo, is the author’s position. He has been praised for dealing with the proletariat, but the beachcombers here can hardly be so considered. It is hard to see how reliance upon instinct will improve the lot of the submerged and the defeated.

The Harlem stories inGingertown(1932) return us to blues singers, “sweet backs,” entertainers, longshoremen, railroad men, barbers, chambermaids, bellhops, waiters and beautiful “brownskins.” All of these are called by McKay the “joy-lovers” of the belt, but their stories do not reveal great joy. In “Brownskin Blues” and “Mattie and Her Sweetman” McKaybitterly scores color prejudice among Negroes themselves; in “Highball” he scores prejudice among the whites. “Near-White” tells conventionally of the unhappy “passer.” In “Truant,” a dining car waiter, married to a social climber, throws up his menial job like a Sherwood Anderson hero. The stories are done with unabashed realism, but they do not cover a wide range.

McKay’s stories of his native Jamaica inGingertownand his third novelBanana Bottom(1933), though realistic, have a pastoral quality. A setting and way of life are skillfully and affectionately conveyed in both books and we are spared preachments on “the problem.” InBanana Bottomespecially, character development is uppermost. The story of Bita Plant, educated in England, is simple and winning. Minor characters like Squire Gensir, Jubban, Anty Nommy and Crazy Bow are memorable, not idealized, but emerging with dignity and warm flesh-and-blood humanity.

Although these are perhaps McKay’s best fiction, the greater part of his work deals with American Negroes, particularly in Harlem. McKay has denied that he was influenced by Van Vechten, stating thatHome To Harlemwas about completed beforeNigger Heavenwas published. There are points of agreement, however; McKay, like Van Vechten, believes in “the inexpressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race,” and therefore seeks in the main the colorful aspects of “the joy-belt.” There are differences as well. Having worked as dining car waiter, porter and longshoreman, McKay knew the unskilled Negro worker at first hand, not from an outside view. “I created my Negro characters without sandpaper and varnish.” Because of this, his people are not the quaint, artless innocents endearedto so many authors and readers. They live hard lives, and are consequently hardened: they may be ignorant, but they are not naïve. In dealing with the urban worker, McKay opened a new field. But the Harlem he portrayed still seems too close to the Harlem of a popular literary fashion. And the “inner lives” he knows so well have not yet been shown with the depth of understanding that one might expect of Claude McKay.

Rudolph Fisher portrays Harlem with a jaunty realism.The Walls of Jerichodeals with types as different as piano-movers and “race-leaders.” The antics of Jinx and Bubber are first-rate slapstick, and though traces of Octavus Roy Cohen appear, most of the comedy is close to Harlem side-walks. Fisher is likewise master of irony. Miss Cramp, the philanthropist, who believes that mulattoes are the result of the American climate, is caricatured, but the picture of the Annual Costume Ball of the G.I.A. (General Improvement Association) is rich comedy of manners. He deftly ridicules the thrill-seekers from downtown who find everything in Harlem “simply marvelous.” Satiric toward professional uplifters,The Walls of Jerichostill has the New Negro militancy. Merrit is an embittered “New Negro”; he believes that the Negro should let the Nordic do the serious things, and spend his time in “tropic nonchalance, developing nothing but his capacity for enjoyment,” and then take complete possession through force of numbers. Fisher likewise shows the spirit of racial unity between the “dicties” and the masses—“Fays don’ see no difference ’tween dickty shines and any other kind o’ shines. One jig in danger is ev’y jig in danger.” It is significant, however, that the wrecking of a Negro’s house in a white neighborhood is the work of a disgruntled Negro, the villain of the book.

But Fisher was less interested in the “problem” than in the life and language of Harlem’s poolrooms, cafes, and barber shops.The Conjure Man Dies(1932), the first detective novel by a Negro, brings Jinx and Bubber back to the scene to help solve one of Harlem’s grisliest murders. A high-brow detective, an efficient Negro police sergeant and an erudite doctor of voodoo are interesting new characters. The novel is above the average in its popular field and was followed by a Harlem tenement murder mystery solved by the same detective.

Before his untimely death, Fisher became one of the best short story writers of the New Negro movement. “The City of Refuge,” containing a good description of the southern migrant’s happy amazement at Harlem, and “Blades of Steel” are first-rate local color of the barber shops, dance-halls and cafes. “Vestiges” and “Miss Cynthie,” for all of their light touch, have an unusual tenderness and fidelity to middle class experience. Fisher was an observer with a quick eye and a keen ear, and a witty commentator. At times his plots are too neat, with something of O. Henry’s trickery. His Harlem is less bitter than McKay’s, but it exists; and his realism, as far as it goes, is as definite as that of any of the numerous writers who took Harlem for their province.

In Countee Cullen’sOne Way To Heaven(1932), Sam Lucas, a one-armed gambler and vagabond, practices a racket around the churches, pretending to be saved at revivals and thereby collecting money. His testimony in a Harlem church converts Mattie, who falls in love with him. Alternately vicious and sentimental, Sam makes Mattie’s life miserable until his pretended death-bed vision of salvation brings happiness to the religious girl. Mattie’s working for Constancia Brown, an upper-class Negro, serves as anexcuse to bring in the artistic-bohemian Harlem. Cullen’s pictures of this set are almost cartoons. He lampoons the back-to-Africa movement, the philistines who form Book-Lovers’ Societies, the public reciters and the extreme New Negro racialists. But Constancia, who refuses to “pass,” speaks the New Negro creed:

Enjoyment isn’t across the line. Money is there, and privilege, and the sort of power which comes with numbers but as for enjoyment, they don’t know what it is.... I have seen two Negroes turn more than one dull party, where I was longing for home and Harlem, into a revel which Puck himself would find it hard to duplicate.

The best part of the novel is the portrayal of the Negro church. This is fresher material, presented with understanding.

Purpose Novels.More realistic than his earlier fiction,Dark Princess(1928) by W. E. B. DuBois, is still part fantasy, and part mordant social criticism. As editor of theCrisis, DuBois had urged a union of the darker races of the world.Dark Princessis an allegory driving home the same message. In its last chapter Matthew Towns, the Negro hero, flies to his homeplace in rural Virginia where his wife, Kautilya, Her Royal Highness of Bwodpur, India, has just given birth to a son, Matthew or Madhu. The son is acclaimed “King of the Snows of Gaurisaukar, Grand Mughal of Utter India, Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds!” Kautilya explains:

There had to be a Maharajah in Bwodpur of the blood royal; else brown reaction and white intrigue had made of it a footstool of England. If I had not borne your son ... Bwodpur and Sindrabad, India, and all the Darker World [would have been lost.]

Less fantastic are the sections dealing with America, in which Matthew Towns meets with galling insults, lack of opportunity on every hand, and the smoothchicanery of Negro politicians. Two interesting characters are Perigua, a Negro anarchist, and Sara, a striving Negro woman, who plays the political game. There are plots and counterplots in the manner of E. Phillips Oppenheim. DuBois speaks of the novel as “rich and colored gossamer of a dream which the Queen of Faerie lent to me for a season.” But the fusion of dream and social realism is not achieved; the novel falls between the two.

A prominent figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Walter White has made use of the novel for social protest.The Fire In The Flint(1925) tells the tragedy of a better-class, aspiring Negro family in a Georgia town. Bob Harper kills two white men who raped his sister. Tracked down by a lynching mob, he shoots himself with his last bullet. His brother Kenneth, a promising young physician, is lynched in the ensuing hysteria for “assaulting a white woman” whom he had been called in to attend.The Fire In The Flintcontains sardonic comment upon the backwardness of the South. The millhands of Factoryville have only “one strong conviction—the inherent and carefully nurtured hatred of the ‘nigger’.” Like the earlier apologists, White makes use of well educated heroes, avoids dialect in the main, concentrates the injustices of the South into fairly small compass, and has bitter contempt for the “cracker” and the Klan. ButThe Fire In The Flinthas more of an impact than the earlier books on lynching.

Although Walter White’sFlight(1926) describes the Atlanta riot, it is principally a novel about “passing.” Mimi Daquin, a New Orleans octoroon of distinguished lineage, has an unfortunate love affair with an upper class Negro in Atlanta, and goes to the North. Seeking security for her child she marries awhite broker, but remains essentially unhappy. Her husband has no love for Negroes. Even as a child, Mimi had believed that Creoles of Negro blood had something “tangible, yet intangible ... a warmth, a delicate humanness” that white Creoles did not have. As a woman, she believes that Negroes alone “can laugh and ... enjoy the benefits of the machine without being crushed by it.” A furtive trip to Harlem makes her wonder if her somber cynical white companions, “whose unhappiness shone through all they did or said,” were worth the price she was paying. When she hears a great Negro artist singing spirituals, she is set free, and returns to her own.

Bourgeois Realism.—Continuing the earlier apologist tradition, with propaganda a little less direct, certain novelists have set out to prove the presence of a Negro upper-class, and to deplore the injustices of its lot. Their standards are bourgeois; they respect characters in ratio to their color, breeding, gentility, wealth and prestige. “Realism” is perhaps a misnomer, if these novels are judged by their plots, which are seldom very life-like; the realism is chiefly in the settings.

Gertrude Sanborn’sVeiled Aristocrats(1923) reveals the type. The “aristocrats under the veil” are mulatto descendants of southern aristocrats—“the souls of worthy men and women caught by a mad fate in a prison of prejudice!” A sentimental white youth is brought into contact with these fine people, especially with Carr McClellan, a World War hero, and a great sculptor. Carr is beloved by the beautiful daughter of a white financier. At the right time she is revealed to be colored too, another “veiled aristocrat,” so everything ends happily. There are many incredible coincidences. Though well-meaning, the author is still condescending. Her protest concludes lamely:“Fact of the matter, most of us are not giving our colored brothers a square deal.”

Zona Gale, introducing Jessie Fauset’s third novel, states inaccurately: “Wherever the American Negro has appeared in fiction, only the uneducated Negro has been pictured.” She is on surer ground when she writes that Negroes of education and substance “merit the awareness of their fellow countrymen.” In her own foreword, Jessie Fauset reveals her bent to “the colored American who is not pressed too hard by the Furies of Prejudice, Ignorance, and Economic Injustice,” and who has his own caste lines.

As naturally as his white compatriot 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 ... sufficiently conservative to lay a slightly greater stress on the first two of these four.

There Is Confusion(1924) has as central characters Joanna Marshall, an ambitious dancer, whose “success and fame were instant,” and Peter Bye, a brilliant, sensitive medical student. The home-life of middle-class Philadelphia receives some attention, but the love story receives far more. The “problem” is never far off. In a pageant, Joanna represents America. Forced by great applause to unmask, she speaks:

I hardly need tell you that there is no one in the audience more American than I am. My great grandfather fought in the Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War, and my brother is ‘over there’ now.

Joanna refuses to marry a Negro whom she found “charming and sympathetic ... [but] too white. She did not want a marriage which would keep the difficulties of color more than ever before her eyes.”Plum Bun(1929) is greatly concerned with “passing.” Believing that “the great rewards of life—riches, glamour, pleasure—are for white-skinnedpeople only,” Angela goes “over the line.” After a disillusioning liaison with a rich white man, “which left no trace on her moral nature,” she falls in love with Anthony Cross, and fears to reveal her secret. But love will find a way: he reveals that he too is of Negro parentage, “passing” because his father was lynched by a mob. So now they can marry, as inVeiled Aristocrats. The beautiful brown sister, for whom life has been evenly pleasant, likewise marries happily at the book’s end.

The Chinaberry Tree(1931) is again concerned less with the unspectacular drama of the Negro middle class, than with the melodrama of the octoroon. The two heroines are illegitimate. Laurentine is the daughter of Aunt Sal and Colonel Halloway, who loved Sal devotedly but could not marry her. In contrast to Laurentine’s love affair, there is a great deal of confusion in the life of Melissa, who is saved only in the nick of time from marrying her half-brother. There are valuable glimpses of Negro community life in Red Brook, the characters ranging from Mrs. Ismay, a Bostonian of “innate gentility,” to young pool-room sports. But the complications springing from the “mystery of birth” make what could have been realism into old-fashioned romance. Olivia Cary, who dominatesComedy, American Style(1933) is obsessed by the need to be white, not out of shame for her blood, but because of the things which the white world possesses. She persecutes her husband and drives her daughter into a loveless marriage and her son to suicide. The bitter comedy of race-prejudice is ultimately blamed. With random flashes of power,Comedy, American Styleis without satiric drive, and manages to be sentimental instead of tragic.

Jessie Fauset has been called by one critic the American woman most worthy “to wear the mantle of JaneAusten’s genius.” This comparison is not apt: Jane Austen’s satiric approach to her people and setting and her neatly logical plots are not evident in Miss Fauset’s four novels. Miss Fauset is sentimental, and regardless of her disclaimers, is an apologist. She records a class in order to praise a race. Favorite characters are chauvinists, condemning “the dastardly American whites,” believing that Negro blood is “the leaven that will purify this Nordic people of their cruelty and their savage lust of power.” Having courageously set herself to chart the class of Negroes she knows, Jessie Fauset, at her best, succeeds in a realism of the sort sponsored by William Dean Howells. Too often, however, instead of typical Negro middle class experience we get the more spectacular “passing,” and exceptional Negro artists and cosmopolitans. Miss Fauset has written:

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.

But her novels rely too much upon Fate and Chance.

The Tragic Mulatto Passes For White.Nella Larsen’sQuicksand(1928) covers a great deal of ground, from Georgia to Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen, and finally a small southern town. Upper class Negroes are her main characters, and their snobbishness is revealed (both consciously and unconsciously). Helga Crane is buffeted about, but does not attain tragic stature. The attempt to reveal a self-centred, harassed personality is commendable, but is not helped by scenes like the one in which the sophisticated heroine attends a church meeting, and there, overwhelmed by the frenzy, begins to yell like one insane, and to weep torrents of tears. She felt “a supreme aspiration toward the regaining of simple happiness... unburdened by the complexities of the lives she had known.” InPassing(1930) Mrs. Larsen is anxious to set before us the refinement and good taste of wealthier Negroes. Clare, who “passes,” is unhappy, and frequently visits Harlem. “You don’t realize, you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.” Says the author’s spokesman, “they always come back.” Discovered in Harlem by her Negro-hating husband, Clare falls from a sixth story window—death solves her problems. Her friend, Irene, who would not “pass,” lives in contrast a happy, respectable life.

White novelists rushed into print with a different version. Vara Caspary’sThe White Girl(1929) and Geoffrey Barnes’Dark Lustre(1932) are so alike in essentials that they should be considered together. Both of the heroines are repelled by Negro life and Negro suitors. Both because of their exotic beauty become artistic models, and both have tragic love affairs with white men. InThe White Girl, Solaria’s secret is revealed by the coincidental appearance of her brown-skinned brother. Desperate, and believing that she is growing darker, she drinks poison. InDark LustreAline’s dilemma is solved by having her die in childbirth, but her whiter baby lives to continue “a cycle of pain.” Both books advance the old superstitions. Solaria at a wild party is thus explained: “It was the colored blood in her, the heritage from some forgotten ancestor, that released these warm wild winds of passion.” Aline is thus explained: “There was too much nigger in her to follow a line of reasoning when the black cloud of her emotions settled over it.” It is all so sad.

Hallie Dickerman’sStephen Kent(1935), on the other hand, takes up the cudgel for her mulatto hero’s superiority, but he is made too superior, winning prizesand acting nobly at every turn. There is much mystery about “tainted blood,” about the reappearance of colored blood “unto the third and fourth generations.” A sympathetic plea for justice,Stephen Kentis still hard to credit.Imitation of Life(1933) by Fannie Hurst was well meaning, perhaps, but it, too, perpetuated old stereotypes. Peola longs to be white: “I won’t be a nigger! I won’t be a nigger!” Her black mother is philosophical about it: “It may be mixed up wid plenty of white blood ... but thin out chicken gravy wid water an’ it remains chicken gravy, only not so good.” When Peola meets with problems:

Lord git de white horses drove out of her blood. Kill de curse—shame de curse her light-colored pap lef’ for his baby. Chase it, rabbit’s foot. Chase de wild white horses trampin’ on my chile’s happiness.... It’s de white horses dat’s wild, a-swimmin’ in de blood of mah chile....

It is no wonder that, longing to be stable, Peola “passes” and marries on the other side. Delilah, with a “rambunctious capacity for devotion,” is the old contented slave, brought up to date, worshipful of her white Miss Honey Bea, to whom her drudgery has brought wealth. The statement is clear: black Negroes, contented with serving and worshipping whites; mixed Negroes, discontented, aspiring, and therefore tragic. Alas, the poor mulatto!

We have thus seen that the mulatto who “passes” has been a victim of opposing interpretations. Negro novelists urge his unhappiness, until he is summoned back to his people by the spirituals, or their full-throated laughter, or their simple sweet ways. One of Wallace Thurman’s characters says:

My dear, you’ve been reading novels. Thousands of Negroes cross the line and I assure you that few, if any, feel that fictional urge to rejoin their own kind.... Negroes who can and do pass are so glad to get away they probably join the K.K.K. to uphold white supremacy.

But this is heresy: a mystical bond must be shown, the cutting of which produces grief, since the white world is “pallid and to be pitied.”

White novelists insist upon the mulatto’s unhappiness for other reasons. To them he is the anguished victim of a divided inheritance. Mathematically they work it out that his intellectual strivings and self-control come from his white blood, and his emotional urgings, indolence and potential savagery come from his Negro blood. Their favorite character, the octoroon, wretched because of the “single drop of midnight in her veins,” desires a white lover above all else, and must therefore go down to a tragic end. The white version is nearly a century old; the Negro version sprang up recently. Both are examples of race flattery. Divided between conflicting attitudes, the poor mulatto finds added unhappiness in his interpreters.

In Opposition.But the idealism seen in the apologistic, the bourgeois, and the “passing” novels found a gleeful critic in George Schuyler, of the H. L. Mencken school of satirists.Black No More(1931) tells how Dr. Crookman discovers a drug that will turn Negroes white. Negroes rush to use it, even the chauvinists who had preached pride of race. Schuyler lampoons both sides, the professional “race-men” who were tremendous gainers from the “problem,” and the spokesman of the Knights of Nordica who, though totally ignorant, discussed over the radio “anthropology, psychology, miscegenation, cooperation with Christ, getting right with God, and curbing Bolshevism....” Telling blows are landed on statisticians, rhetorical windbags, pretentious strivers and hat-in-hand Negroes, butBlack No Moreis farce rather than satire, in the last analysis—provoking more mirth than thought. It was, however, refreshingly different.Slaves Today(1932) is an attack upon the mistreatmentof the natives in Liberia by the upper-class Americo-Liberians. Schuyler’s narrative sketches in such magazines asThe American Mercuryare told with terseness and point.

Wallace Thurman is likewise the “devil’s advocate” in his two novels. Emma Lou inThe Blacker The Berry(1929) is another defeated heroine, not because she is an octoroon, however, but for precisely the opposite reason. Well-educated, she is unable to get suitable positions and social life because she is black. She goes around for a time with the “New Negro intellectuals,” but is ill at ease with them. Scorned and rejected, she sinks deeper and deeper into drabness. Thurman thus puts his finger upon one of the sorest points of the Negro bourgeoisie, its color snobbishness, “its blue vein circle,” “aspiring to be whiter and whiter every generation.” His descriptions of Harlem rent parties and the like are of Van Vechten’s school, but the theme of his novel deserves attention. Unfortunately the writing is slipshod, and the steady decline of his central character is less tragic than depressing. His heroine is as morbidly sensitive about color as any tragic octoroon, and shows as little fight.

The Infants of The Spring(1932) shows Thurman taking less seriously his coterie of Harlem artists. Young in years and achievement, they flatter themselves as “a lost generation,” and like Van Vechten’s Byron, seek escape in dissipation. One cynical character speaks:

Being a Negro writer in these days is a racket and I’m going to make the most of it while it lasts. I find queer places for whites to go in Harlem ... out-of-the-way primitive churches, side street speakeasies and they fall for it. About twice a year I manage to sell a story.... I am a genius in the making. Thank God for this Negro Literary Renaissance! Long may it flourish!

Debunking the Bohemian futility of the intellectuals, Thurman is just as severe on the bourgeois idealistsand the various race-messiahs.Infants of The Springis at times peevish, at times angry, crudely written, and not always well thought out. But like Thurman’s first novel, it had something to say.

Black Sadie(1928) by T. Bowyer Campbell is an irritated southerner’s attempt to debunk the Harlem that lured jaded Bohemians. From “corn-field nigger” Sadie rises to be model for the New Negro exaltation ofAfrica victrix, and the toast of artistic New York. Even in her affluence, however, Sadie is a kleptomaniac. After causing a murder, she returns to happy Virginia. “Easy come, easy go, niggers” are Campbell’s closing words. Campbell’s satire has point, but he is too vexed to get it across. It is obvious, also, that the stereotype he prefers is that of the comic menial.

Dark Surrenderby Ronald Kirkbride (1933), after describing South Carolina plantation life in the manner of Julia Peterkin, delivers an attack upon the “New Negro.” Having deserted a wife on the plantation, who promptly becomes a Scarlet Sister Mary, Tom goes to the North, graduates from Harvard with athletic and scholastic honors, visits Europe, and becomes a great poet. But he gives it all up as “imitation of the accomplishments of the white man,” and returns to the soil. To the white owner of the plantation he states that Negroes

who have aspirations and yearn to be great ... are fools in the sense that they are not true negroes.... To live from day to day in simple enjoyment, with no cares nor worries, with no great attempts, to be something which you are not ... that is life, the true life.... The negro has his place in the present, in the simple life, with no desires but of the body, with no yearnings for the future nor for the past....

Maxwell Bodenheim, with a naturalist’s approach, could not see in Harlem only a place of joy-filled Negroes. InNaked On Roller Skates(1931) he shows the harsher, truculent aspects of Harlem dives. InNinth Avenue(1926) he shows the seamy aspectsof Manhattan. His white heroine in this book marries a Negro, a better man than any of the Ninth Avenue set. Contrary to O’Neill’sAll God’s Chillun Got Wingsthis intermarriage is not doomed to failure. InDeep River(1934) Clement Wood does not have the regret, disdain, or anxiety with which most southern novelists look upon Harlem and the “New Negro.” This chronicle of the marriage of a noted Negro singer to a white woman is frankly done, exploiting a subject generally taboo. But it is hardly worthy to stand alongside Wood’s earlier novelNigger.

Summary.The fiction of urban realism was valuable for introducing new characters in a new milieu. Whether created by Negro or white authors, the characters are race-conscious, and at times militant. But the old stereotypes by no means disappeared. Carl Van Vechten has a noted magazine editor comment on the possibilities of Negro literature:

Nobody has yet written a good gambling story; nobody has gone into the curious subject of the divers tribes of the region.... Nobody has ever done the Negro servant-girl, who refuses to live in. Washing dishes in the day-time, she returns at night to Harlem where she smacks her daddy in the jaw or else dances and makes love. On the whole I should say she has the best time of any domestic servant in the world.... The Negro fast set does everything the Long Island fast set does ... but it is vastly more amusing ... for the simple reason that it isamused.

Most authors took this to heart. What resulted was a search for the exotic and an insistence that Negroes were peculiarly marked by a “joy of living.” Dance-halls, rent-parties, gambling, sprees, casual love-affairs crowded out more serious realism. The cabin was exchanged for the cabaret, but Negroes were still described as “creatures of joy.” Even Negro propagandists urged this, seeking to find some superior “racial gift.” To look for the true life of a Negro community in cabarets, most often run by white managers for white thrill-seekers, is like looking for thetruth about slavery in the off-time banjo-plunking and capers before the big house. Focusing upon carefree abandon, the Harlem school, like the plantation tradition, neglected the servitude. Except for brief glimpses, the drama of the workaday life, the struggles, the conflicts, are missing. And such definite features of Harlem as the lines of the unemployed, the overcrowded schools, the delinquent children headed straight to petty crime, the surly resentment—all of these seeds that bore such bitter fruit in the Harlem riot—are conspicuously absent.

Bourgeois realists did “apprise white humanity of the better classes among Negro humanity,” but this is a value apart from the values of fiction. Their upper-class characters too often seem to serve as window-display. “Passing for white” is made a much more acute and frequent problem that it is in ordinary Negro middle class experience. With discerning satire, Martha Gruening sums up the argument of Negro bourgeois realism:

I am writing this book because most white people still believe that all Colored People are cooks called Mandy or Pullman porters called George—but they aren’t. They think we all live in cotton field cabins or in city slums, but actually some of us live on Edgecomb Avenue or Chestnut Street. We don’t all shout at Camp Meeting or even all belong to the Baptist or Methodist church. Some of us areEpiscopalians. If you were privileged to visit our homes (which you aren’t, for we are just as exclusive as you are) you would find bathtubs, sets of the best authors and etchings! That’s how refined we are. We have class distinctions, too.... The daughters of our upper classes are beautiful and virtuous and look like illustrations inVogue... far more attractive than white girls of the same class, for they come in assorted shades.... Joy isn’t on your side of the line, nor song, nor laughter.

There is certainly place in American fiction for treatment of the Negro middle-class. The precarious situation of this small group could well attract a realist of vision, not only to satirize its pretense, but also to record its dogged struggling. But to approveit in proportion to its resembling white middle-class life, is not the way of important realism.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What earlier fiction dealt with the Negro in northern cities?

2. How is the Van Vechten tradition similar to the plantation tradition?

3. List the authors who consider the Negro to be a “creature of joy.”

4. Why have the novels of “bourgeois realism” been called “prospectuses to sell the white world the idea of a Negro middle class?”

5. Why are the opposing attitudes to “passing” examples of race flattery?

6. What northern cities with large Negro populations are as yet untreated by novelists?

7. What is race-chauvinism? Point out examples in the fiction discussed.

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