When Washington Was In Vogue

by Edward Christopher Williams

  The man who seems to me to be the most overpowering was E. C. Williams, Librarian and head of the Romance Language department. He was cosmopolitan and world-traveled. His wit was instant and subtle. He was so inaccessible in a way, too. He told me once that a flirtation with a co-ed was to him like playing with a teething-ring. He liked smart, sophisticated women. He used to lunch every day with E. D. Davis, head of the Greek and German department. Davis was just the antithesis of Williams, so shy, in the Charles S. Johnson manner, in spite of his erudition. They would invite me to come along and would pay for my milk and pie. Williams did most of the talking. I put in something now and then. Davis sat and smiled. Professor Williams egged me on to kiss him. He said that Davis would throw a fit, and he wanted to be present to see it. He whispered that Davis liked to have me around, but from what he ever said, I couldn’t notice. When I was sick, Professor Davis came to see me and brought me an armload of roses, but he sat there half an hour and scarcely said a word. He just sat there and smiled now and then.

  One day a pretty Washington girl visited me on campus and joined us at lunch. She laid down a heavy barrage around E. C. Williams. He leaned back in his chair in the midst of her too-obvious play and said suddenly, “Girlie, you would flirt with the Pope.”

  Williams was in his late forties or early fifties when Hurston met him, and her picture of him gives us a fuller sense of Williams as something more than just the sum of his many accomplishments and talents. Williams was also clearly a man who was sometimes fascinated and often amused by young, modern women, and this particular interest extends across his life and fiction. In two of his unpublished short stories, “The Colonel” and “The Incomparable Dolly,”2 Williams’s protagonists are older, slightly stuffy men who fall in love with younger, fashionable women. This dynamic is also at play in the relationship between Davy and Caroline in When Washington Was in Vogue. Although it is always perilous to equate an author with his characters, I cannot help but wonder if Williams’s characters act out the desires of their creator—a fifty-year-old librarian surrounded by undergraduates—to participate in the social experimentation of the Jazz Age rather than merely observe it from a safe distance.

  I do not mean to suggest, however, that Williams might have felt as though time was passing him by. Born just eight years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Williams became the first professionally trained African-American librarian in America, and he must have understood that he was a living example of the historical development of black life in America. Indeed, it would have been impossible for Williams not to feel like an active participant in the course of history. Two phenomena in particular should be considered in conjunction with When Washington Was in Vogue’. African-American military service during World War I, and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North. Williams’s protagonist is a product of both of these developments. Captain Davy Carr was one of the two hundred thousand African Americans who served in Europe during the war, and he and Bob Fletcher may have been among the first black officers to be trained by the United States Army. As many scholars have noted, black service in World War I provided an enormous psychological boost to African Americans, and this military service has been named as an important contributing factor toward the rise of the “New Negro” movement of the 1920s.3

  Davy Carr is also a part of the Great Migration of 1915-1930, a mass movement of African Americans from the mostly rural South to the urban centers of the North and West. A number of factors produced this migration: economic and ecological disasters were ravaging the farming economy of the South; anti-immigration laws were closing off U.S. borders to foreign workers; and World War I was draining northern factories of their labor pool. Most important of all, Jim Crow conditions of peonage, segregation, violence, and rabid discrimination made life unbearable for African Americans in the South. Although the North and West were certainly not free of such problems, they did offer living conditions that were infinitely more desirable than did the states of the former Confederacy. According to Alain Locke, whose anthology, The New Negro, signaled the arrival of a “New Negro Renaissance,” the Great Migration was “a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.”4 Like hundreds of thousands of African Americans, Davy Carr makes his way north in order to pursue a life of his own choosing.

  Davy’s story, however, is not set in the North, but in Washington, D.C., a place that bore many of the South’s more despicable aspects of racial intolerance in the 1920s. A useful portrait of Washington during this period can be found in The Messenger, the same magazine that originally serialized When Washington Was in Vogue under the title The Letters of Davy Carr. From 1923 through 1926, The Messenger ran a series of articles, “These ‘Colored’ United States,” that provides a panoramic, state-bystate analysis of black life in America; in October, 1923, it published Neval H. Thomas’s “The District of Columbia—a Paradise of Paradoxes.” As it happens, Thomas’s biography bears an uncanny resemblance to Williams’s, and so his depiction of Washington is particularly worth noting. Thomas, who would eventually rise to prominence in the NAACP, was born in Ohio in 1874, just three years after Williams was born in the same state. Both men eventually made their way to Washington, where Thomas pursued his education while working at the Library of Congress. Also like Williams, Thomas died a relatively young man in 1930; he was fifty-six.5

  Neval Thomas’s depiction of Washington, D.C., in the 1920s highlights the many social ills that prey at the margins of the vibrant social world portrayed in When Washington Was in Vogue. Thomas describes the nation’s capital as a city marred by violent racism and legally enforced segregation, warped by lack of opportunity in education and the workplace, and pervaded by a mean-spiritedness that informs both its history and its contemporary daily life. He notes with bitterness that the slave trade flourished in the capital for many years, and that auction blocks could be found throughout the city. “Save a few years of Reconstruction,” Thomas writes, “the national capital has been to the Negro a scene of sorrow” (79). But Thomas also argues that African Americans managed to flourish in Washington, and in doing so, he describes a thriving, if also necessarily self-contained, world very much like the one found in When Washington Was in Vogue:

  Our people are grouped in numbers of organisations and clubs, some for social service, others for self-improvement, like book lovers’ clubs; and in beneficial societies. We have many forward-looking men and women who study the world movements from such able and progressive magazines as The Messenger, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Liberator, and at the Bethel Literary Society we hear messages from every thinking group in the world. Washington social life is the most cultured in the country. To attend any social function is to see a marvel in self-culture, for we see women of various colors, without social contact outside the race, the equal in physical beauty, refinement of conduct, grace in manner and dress, and exquisite social charm of the highest bred Anglo-Saxon woman anywhere in the world. The white man keeps the full weight of his superior numbers, oppressive spirit, and unjust monopoly of political power, hard pressed against this suffering, yet beautiful little world of striving, but we grow to fuller stature in spite of it all. Though he closes such splendid educational agencies as the opera, and such refining experiences as the exercise of civil privileges, to this struggling people, we acquire culture, not through segregation and oppression, but in spite of them.

  In When Washington Was in Vogue, E. C. Williams gives us our first extensive view of the “fictional beautiful little world of striving” described by Neval Thomas. Davy Carr comes from the South during the Great Migration, faces combat during World War I, and then arrives in a center of African-American culture that rivaled the renaissance in Harlem. In fact, When Washington Was in Vogue might just help dispel the notion that the New Negro Renaissance was ever real
ly as localized as the term “Harlem Renaissance” implies, because the novel and Williams’s own life demonstrate just how culturally vibrant the District of Columbia was in the teens and twenties.

  Thomas’s essay on Washington, D.C., also highlights two of the most important themes in When Washington Was in Vogue’. the intra-racial politics of skin tone and the experience of modern love in an African-American community. I want to suggest that the novel can be read as having two parts devoted to these themes. In the beginning chapters of the novel, Davy makes frequent observations about variations in skin color, and, considering himself something of an amateur sociologist, he notes the ways in which the politics and mores of color manifest themselves among his friends and acquaintances. In one of his letters to Bob Fletcher, Davy describes Caroline, her sister, Genevieve, and Thomasine Dawson, three of his closest female friends in Washington, by noting their differing shades. Davy then moves on to an analysis of color that consumed many black authors of the period:

  There was Genevieve, who, barring a little tropical warmth in the lines of her mouth, would pass for a descendant of English or American stock; Caroline, whose vivid coloring, dark skin, and flashing eyes would suggest Spain, or Sicily; and Thomasine Dawson, who might have graced the throne of one of the ancient rulers of the Nile! … Why, why, why, with such a variety of beauty of every type under the blue canopy, must we discard as worthless all but one, and that the one in which we can hope least of all to compete with the other race groups environing us? I do not believe, and never have believed, that women of their own choice make of themselves neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring, but they do so through a sort of moral and social compulsion, because so many colored men of the more prosperous class seem to be attracted only by fair women approximating the white type.

  Davy’s observations about the intra-racial preference for fairskinned mates echo a concern that pervaded the era. For even though there was, as Langston Hughes suggested, a Negro “vogue” in the 1920s, opportunities were more likely to elude those African Americans with darker complexions. Indeed, many of the political and cultural luminaries of the so-called “Talented Tenth (W. E. B. Du Bois’s term for the emerging black vanguard in the first decades of the twentieth century) were fair; Williams himself was fair enough to pass for white, which is also true for his protagonist, Davy. Claude McKay, the most important sonneteer of the Renaissance, makes a similar observation in his review of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s all-black Broadway hit, Shuffle Along. Praising the musical on a number of levels, McKay nonetheless takes the production to task for its “disappointing casting: “Instead of making up to achieve a uniform near-white complexion the chorus might have made up to accentuate the diversity of shades among ‘Afro-Americans’ and let white audiences in on the secret of the color nomenclature of the Negro world.”6

  As both Williams and McKay indicate, black women in particular were victims to the preference for lighter skin. The most well-known fictionalized treatment of this subject is Wallace Thurman’s 1929 novel, The Blacker the Berry, which begins with Emma Lou Morgan’s acute awareness of the drawbacks presented by her “luscious black complexion.” Her painful self-consciousness owes directly to her family’s sense of shame and inferiority at having such a dark daughter:

  She wasn’t the only person who regretted her darkness either. It was an acquired family characteristic, this moaning and grieving over the color of her skin. Everything possible had been done to alleviate the unhappy condition, every suggested agent had been employed, but her skin, despite bleachings, scourgings, and powderings, had remained black—fast black— as nature planned and effected.

  She should have been a boy, then color of skin wouldn’t have mattered so much, for wasn’t her mother always saying that a black boy could get along, but that a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment I But she wasn’t a boy; she was a girl, and color did matter…. 7

  Although Caroline Rhodes is not as dark as Thurman’s main character, she is noticeably darker than Davy, her unwitting suitor, who describes her as having a Mediterranean complexion. Davy is, however, admirably indifferent to the putative values assigned to Caroline’s skin tone, and thus Williams’s novel can be read as a celebration of “the secret nomenclature of the colored world.”

  But if Davy is personally unconcerned about Caroline’s coloring, he is almost painfully aware of her modern temperament and behavior. Describing himself as an “older person” with “mid-Victorian notions,” Davy tells Bob that Caroline has “all the best and the worst points of the modern flapper.” Such points are on display from the outset. During Davy’s first private meeting with Caroline, when she invites herself into his room, Caroline smokes in front of him while deriding her mother and sister for being too old-fashioned. Davy finds all of this charming, but he also suspects that Caroline’s progressive thinking might be merely the last vestiges of her adolescence rather than a clearly articulated challenge to convention: “[S]he sat, swinging her silk-clad legs with the abandon of a small boy, and regaled me in terms piquant and interesting, if a trifle startling at times, with her very modern views of the woman question, fellows, and marriage. Viewed from some standpoints, it was decidedly refreshing, but I am not sure that it was not more shocking than anything else.”

  For Davy, Caroline embodies the questions he asks her in the early chapters of the book: “Is the love of an up-to-date, modern girl worth having? Or, if worth having, is there any way in which to be sure of it?” Davy’s answers come in the second half of the book, when he has been in Washington long enough to feel more like an accepted insider than like a sociological observer of an alien culture. As his involvement with Caroline becomes deeper and ever more complicated, Davy loses his interest in reporting on the black community of D.C. to Bob, and his letters become instead the transcripts of a man who does not realize he is in love.

  Davy’s inability to recognize his own feelings has everything to do with the historical differences between Caroline and him. Even though he is a participant in two of twentieth century America’s most important modern developments, the Great Migration and black service in the war, Davy happily thinks of himself as out of step with many recent developments of modern behavior, which he considers too uncouth for polite society—a social construct he heartily endorses. He is gentlemanly to a fault, dislikes cabarets and most contemporary music, and blushes at the smallest social improprieties. Whatever his actual age, Davy considers himself much older and rather old-fashioned in comparison with Caroline, who bobs her hair, wears abbreviated clothing, drinks bootleg liquor, and smokes cigarettes whenever her mother isn’t looking. Williams’s novel appears to share the anti-modernism of its protagonist, because as the novel progresses, Caroline alters her behavior to suit Davy’s tastes and win his affection. Modern flappers may fascinate Davy Carr, but at the end of the day, he is far more comfortable in the company of women who behave according to traditional expectations. Although it is a delightful novel, When Washington Was in Vogue is not a particularly feminist novel.8

  But When Washington Was in Vogue, if not entirely forward thinking in terms of gender, is also more than just a good read. It is, in fact, an extraordinary novel. Published almost sixty years before Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), When Washington Was in Vogue is quite probably the first example of an epistolary novel in African-American literary history. Writing a novel composed almost entirely of letters (the last pages of the book are a diary entry), Williams mastered a form that has its origins in the eighteenth century but had largely fallen into disuse by the twentieth. Although this literary strategy may not seem as innovative as the modernist experimentation found in such contemporary works as Jean Toomer’s Cane and Langston Hughes’s blues poetry, the epistolary form perfectly suits the subject matter of When Washington Was in Vogue. Davy is, after all, an old-fashioned man reacting to the modern world; his formal letters to Bob reflect the state of his psyche, give a good indication o
f his physical bearing, and demonstrate Davy’s self-presentation with immediacy and verisimilitude. Davy’s letters to Bob are an excellent measure of both his strength of character and his weakness of emotional insight. When Washington Was in Vogue is indeed an important addition to the twinned canons of American and African-American literature.

  When Washington Was in Vogue is also a welcome addition more specifically to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance; in fact, as I hinted earlier in this introduction, Williams’s novel offers a definitive challenge to the idea that the explosion of African-American creativity in the first decades of the twentieth century can accurately be called the “Harlem” Renaissance at all. When Williams was writing, terms such as “Negro Renaissance,” “New Negro Renaissance,” and “New Negro Movement” were used to describe the cultural phenomenon that was, perhaps, centered in Harlem but had pockets of black creative and intellectual activity throughout the African Diaspora. The literary ferment in Washington, D.C., that encouraged Williams to write plays and fiction had important links to the Negritude movement of the Francophone world, to developments in Pan-Africanism, as well as to the vibrant culture of Harlem.

  The connection between Williams’s book and other African-American novels of the period are myriad. Like the middle section of Toomer’s Cane (1923), When Washington Was in Vogue is set in Washington, D.C. According to an unpublished letter written by Toomer9 in 1921, he met with a small group of intellectuals, including Williams, to discuss the status of people with “mixed-blood,” which is a central concern of Williams’s book. Until now, Toomer’s experimental novel, which largely condemns the bourgeois stuffiness of Washington’s black community, was our only extensive fictional view into that place and time. With When Washington Was in Vogue, we acquire an entirely different perspective from Toomer’s, because the world Toomer paints in Cane as insular and narrow-minded is portrayed by Williams as one marked by accomplishment, creativity, and aspiration. Williams, however, is no Babbittesque booster of the District. He sees its flaws and writes about them, but the community’s foibles are set in a wider and more generous perspective than Toomer’s. In this sense, When Washington Was in Vogue more closely resembles Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, which offers both praise and blame for the black bourgeoisie in New York and Chicago.