On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  In 1928, McKay’s most acclaimed work appeared, the novel Home to Harlem, which won the prestigious Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The best-selling novel presented a realistic and unvarnished view of Harlem street life, which influenced black writers and intellectuals throughout the United States, the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. White critics hailed it as “the real stuff, the lowdown on Harlem, the dope from the inside.” However, the novel’s honest portrayal of sexuality and the darker side of Harlem’s nightlife drew harsh criticism from McKay’s former hero Du Bois, who stated, “Home to Harlem…for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” For Du Bois, any art that didn’t serve the propaganda needs of promoting the New Negro wasn’t art at all. Yet, the young black writers who worshipped art for art’s sake praised the novel. Langston Hughes embraced it as “the finest thing ‘we’ve’ done yet.” The public agreed: within two weeks of publication, McKay’s gritty book became the first best-selling novel by an African-American writer. McKay also published two other novels, Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933); a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); and two autobiographies, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).

  Claude McKay’s commitment to instilling pride and self-reliance can be experienced in the opening lines of his poem “White House” (the poem that caused his angry response to Alain Locke, who changed the title for inclusion in The New Negro):

  Your door is shut against my tightened face,

  And I am sharp as steel with discontent;

  But I possess the courage and the grace

  To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

  4. Their Eyes Were Watching: Zora Neale Hurston

  The black woman writing during the Harlem Renaissance had two reluctant audiences to win over: the white reader and the male reader, white and black. For her message wasn’t just about the prejudice against color, it was also about the prejudice against gender. Janie Crawford, the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891–1960) most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), explains, with resignation, the pecking order of her world:

  “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tub find out. Maybe it’s some place off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so far as Ah can see.”

  This message is not necessarily the one people wanted to hear, especially those associated with the political activism of the Harlem Renaissance. Feminism, even as mild as this, would have to wait another thirty years before it became a widely accepted theme in fiction. But Zora Neale Hurston chose to go her own way—as a woman, as an artist, and as an African-American—which brought her both praise and condemnation from those who expected her to follow their lead regarding what to write about and how to write about it. Despite these obstacles, Hurston became the most prolific and well-known black woman writer in America.

  Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida, where her father was both the town’s mayor and Baptist minister. Her mother offered her advice that young Zora took to heart: “Jump at the sun. We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.” Her mother’s death when Hurston was nine left the eight children with an unstable home life. She went to live with various relatives, eventually attending Howard University, where her short stories caught the attention of Professor Alain Locke. Impressed with her knowledge of black folk heritage, Locke recommended her to Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity magazine. In the fall of 1924, Johnson invited Hurston to come to Harlem.

  Only a few months later, Hurston made her literary debut at the Opportunity awards dinner in the spring of 1925. This event was Charles S. Johnson’s masterpiece of public relations, designed to launch “a new period in creative expression among Negroes.” Awards were to be given for the best poems, short stories, essays, and plays by black writers. Among the judges were the distinguished white literary icons Fannie Hurst, Robert Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott. That evening, Hurston won more awards than any other writer. It also set the course of her life for the next several years. Best-selling author Fannie Hurst (Imitation of Life, 1933) hired Hurston as her personal secretary and chauffeur, and Annie Nathan Meyer, the founder of Barnard College, gave Hurston a scholarship to attend Barnard, where she became that school’s first black graduate.

  Hurston enthusiastically embraced the lifestyle of the rising literary star, attending rent parties and literary gatherings with equal joy. “I am just running wild in every direction,” she confessed, “trying to see everything at once.” Many were impressed with the maturity of someone so young, not realizing that Hurston had deliberately shaved ten years off her age, a fact not discovered until after her death. Maybe awareness of her real age helped convince Hurston to take advantage of the opportunities she was finally receiving because, for the first time in her academic career, she also began to take her studies seriously. At Barnard, she studied anthropology under world-renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas encouraged her to collect the black folktales that she had grown up with. The result was life-altering for Hurston, who before Boas had felt confined by her knowledge of black folklore. Hurston’s folklore studies brought her the patronage of wealthy white philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason. To encourage Hurston’s anthropological collection of folklore in the South, Mason drew up a contract in which she promised to provide Hurston with $200 a month, a movie camera, and a car in exchange for “all of said information, data, transcripts of music, etc., which she shall have obtained.”

  Hurston’s belief that “folk were creating an art that didn’t need the sanction of art to affirm its beauty” helped shape her subsequent fiction writing. Rather than write about educated, middle-class characters as did Jessie Fauset and some of the other Harlem writers, she chose not only to write about the poor, working-class Southern blacks she’d grown up with, she also wrote in their slang. Ironically, Hurston’s writing was criticized more by black readers than white readers, because they didn’t think she was harsh enough in her condemnation of the treatment of blacks in the South. Black critics also accused her of portraying poor blacks in a way that would hold all blacks up to ridicule. Once again, the debate over art and propaganda had come crashing into the literary world, though this time, the attacks seemed more personal.

  In 1937, in a fever of inspiration, Hurston wrote in only seven weeks what would become her most famous novel. Their Eyes Were Watching God, clearly autobiographical, is more about the plight of being a woman than being black, which is part of the reason her work was criticized by black male critics. Two years later, following the publication of another book on folklore, she published Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), a blending of fiction, folklore, religion, and comedy. Despite critical praise, the book did not sell well. At the request of her publisher, Hurston reluctantly began work on her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), which sold well and made her in demand again. However, the next few novels she wrote were rejected by her publisher as not being of high enough quality.

  The next few years proved to be overwhelming for Hurston. Her next published novel, Seraph on the Swanee (1948), was about white people. Hurston had written to Carl Van Vechten, “I have hopes of breaking that old silly rule about Negroes not writing about white people.” Her daring artistic choice brought predictable backlash from black writers who interpreted this as yet another sign that she had abandoned her race. Though the book sold well, Hurston felt even more marginalized by the black community. The final blow came on September 13, 1948, when Hurston was arrested in New York, charged with committing an immoral act with the ten-year-old son of her landlady. Hurston proved she was out of the country when the supposed attack took place, but the subsequent stories in the press deva
stated her. She couldn’t help but wonder whether the readiness to believe the false story was punishment for not writing what some wanted her to write.

  Although Hurston continued to publish articles, she never published another novel. Indeed, her situation continued to deteriorate. Broke, she moved back to Florida, where out of desperation she took a job as a maid. When her employers discovered who she was, they called the newspapers and another humiliating headline spit in her face. She immediately claimed that she was merely doing research for a book about domestics, but it was clear that she was struggling to survive. For the rest of her life she worked at temporary jobs such as reporter and librarian, publishing the occasional magazine article. Hurston further alienated African-American civil rights leaders when she wrote a letter to the Orlando Sentinel condemning the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. For Hurston the decision was a slap in the face to “the self-respect of my people”: “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?…It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.”

  After a stroke in October of 1959, Hurston was forced to enter the Saint Lucie County Welfare Home, where she died three months later. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery. A collection was taken up to pay for her funeral. One of the most promising and successful writers of the Harlem Renaissance had died in poverty and obscurity, some critics claim, as a result of her determination to write beyond the confines of what the male African-American intelligentsia demanded. But because of this determination, Hurston was rediscovered in the 1970s, thanks in large part to writer Alice Walker (The Color Purple), whose 1975 article for Ms. magazine, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” caused Hurston’s work to be rediscovered and republished. (Walker had a headstone placed on Hurston’s grave with the inscription “A Genius of the South.”) A 2005 TV movie of Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry and produced by Oprah Winfrey, has further increased Hurston’s popularity as both a writer and a woman of independent thinking. Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God, may have summed up Hurston’s own attitude of living without regret: “If yuh kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin’ round and God opened de door.”

  5. The Cane That Was Able: Jean Toomer

  Nathan Eugene Toomer (1894–1967) struggled with identity issues his whole life. Light-skinned enough to sometimes pass for white, he nevertheless was eager to embrace his black heritage. Yet, at times, he also wanted to distance himself from that heritage. He wanted to be a literary writer, but he didn’t always like the elitist circle of other writers it brought him in contact with. He saw himself as of the common people, though he still sometimes placed himself above them.

  Born in Washington, D.C., Toomer had the distinction of being the grandson of the first African-American governor in the United States, Pinckney Pinchback of Louisiana. When his father abandoned the family, his mother moved them into her father’s autocratic household in Washington, where he attended an all-black school. His mother remarried in 1906, moving the family to an all-white neighborhood in New Rochelle, New York, where Toomer attended an all-white school. Following the death of his mother in 1909, he returned to Washington and attended the all-black Paul Dunbar High School, where Jessie Fauset had taught. His early educational experiences played havoc with his sense of racial identity and cultural heritage, so that by the time he graduated high school in 1914, he’d made the dramatic and naive decision to reject any racial category and live only as an American.

  The next seven years were spent wandering the country in search of a personal identity and purpose. For three of those years he became a vagabond student, studying agriculture, physical education, psychology, and literature at various schools. However, despite his great hunger for learning, he never completed a degree. When not attending school, he spent time as a bodybuilder, a welder, a Ford salesman, a physical education instructor, and a hobo. By 1919, the toll of such an undirected and chaotic life resulted in a bout of nervous exhaustion. He was desperate for something to give his life meaningful direction.

  In 1920, while attending a party in the Greenwich Village home of Irish-born poet Lola Ridge (The Ghetto and Other Poems, 1918), Toomer met a group of writers that he considered to be the “aristocracy of culture, of spirit and character, of ideas, of true nobility.” Finally comfortable among a group of people, Toomer quickly became friends with many notable writers, including Edwin Arlington Robinson, Witter Bynner, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, and Malcolm Cowley. Inspired, Toomer returned to Washington, where he would care for his ailing grandfather and begin his own literary career. He wrote relentlessly, churning out plays, poems, essays, and reviews. His poem “The First American” expressed his previous declaration of moving beyond racial classifications: “I wrote a poem called ‘The First American,’ the idea of which was that here in America we are in the process of forming a new race, that I was one of the first conscious members of this race…. I had seen the divisions, the separatisms and antagonisms…[yet] a new type of man was arising in this country—not European, not African, not Asiatic—but American. And in this American I saw the divisions mended, the differences reconciled.”

  In 1921, Toomer underwent an experience that changed his racial attitudes. He moved to Sparta, Georgia, for a job as the temporary principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute. For the first time, he lived among rural Southern blacks and experienced their lives: “There for the first time I really saw the Negro, not as pseudo-urbanized and vulgarized, a semi-Americanized product, but the Negro peasant, strong with the tang of fields and soil.” For the two months he spent in Sparta, he studied his surroundings with the same intensity he’d studied everything else. When he emerged, he felt he had finally resolved his own questions of racial identity: “When I live with the blacks, I’m a Negro. When I live with the whites, I’m white, or better, a foreigner. I used to puzzle my own brain with the question. But now I’m done with it.”

  Not quite done. Toomer used his own spiritual and racial rebirth to write one of the most influential novels of the period, Cane (1923). Like himself, the novel defied strict categorization and was hailed as both a seminal work of the Harlem Renaissance because of its focus on race consciousness, and a shining example of the Lost Generation because of its experimental technique (merging short stories, poetry, plays, and prose) and disillusionment with postwar values. Following Cane’s publication, Toomer was embraced by the movers and shakers of the Harlem Renaissance and hailed as the most promising African-American writer of his time. His friend and fellow novelist Waldo Frank rhapsodized, “[Cane] is a harbinger of the South’s literary maturity…. And, as the initial work of a man of 27, it is a harbinger of a literary force of whose incalculable future I believe no reader of this book will be in doubt.” Black critic and writer William Stanley Braithwaite was even more exhuberant: “Jean Toomer…artist of the race…can write about the Negro without the surrender or the compromise of the artist’s vision…. He would write just as well…about the peasants of Russia or…Ireland, had experience given him the knowledge of their existence. Cane is a book of gold…and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature.”

  However, Toomer was not comfortable being a part of the movement. To identify himself as part of the Harlem Renaissance meant labeling himself a Negro, which he felt was too confining as both a man and as an artist. He complained to his publisher about referring to him as a Negro writer, stating that “you never use such a word, such a thought again.” He confessed to James Weldon Johnson that the “Negro Art movement…is for those who have and will benefit by it…[but] is not for me.” Like Claude McKay, Toomer was more concerned with the bigger pict
ure of class than with color. Color was a distraction, he thought, when the real hope of blacks was to join with other workers to bring about real social change. For Toomer, many of the black elite of the Harlem Renaissance were fighting to join an already corrupt society that only had room at the banquet for a Talented Tenth. All others, white and black, would always be dining on table scraps.

  Despite being hailed as a promising writer, and despite a prolific output of poems, plays, autobiographies, novels, and articles, Toomer never again published with a commercial house. Publishers found his writing after Cane to be boring and indulgent, and they pointed out that Cane had sold less than five hundred copies. Toomer continued his spiritual quest as well, finally joining the Society of Friends and devoting the rest of his life to activities within the Quaker community.

  6. The Sweet Harvest of Wallace Thurman

  While the old guard of Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois were carefully crafting a cadre of accomplished literary talents to parade proudly down the wide boulevard of white culture, a few of the younger African-American writers who were either denied entry or who were uncomfortable being among the anointed were looking for other means to express their views. In 1925, Wallace Thurman (1902–34), a talented writer and influential editor, arrived in Harlem at the age of twenty-three boldly ready to gather those misfits into their own literary circle to make their views widely known.

  Like Jean Toomer and Claude McKay, Thurman rejected the notion that the Harlem Renaissance should be nothing more than a publicity machine to promote politics regardless of the quality of the writing. Like Toomer, he was especially sensitive about racial identity, but in Thurman’s case, he resented the prejudice within the black community, which obviously valued lighter skin versus the darker skin that Thurman had. One of his most dramatic encounters with this kind of prejudice occurred when his friend Langston Hughes introduced him to writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent at a cafeteria. Light-skinned Nugent was shocked by the darkness of Thurman’s skin to the point that he later admitted he couldn’t eat. (This scene is portrayed in the dramatic film Brother to Brother, 2004.) “How dare he be so black,” Nugent recalled thinking. Though they became good friends, collaborators, and roommates, that encounter left its mark on Thurman.