On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  To Thurman, this kind of skin color bias among African-Americans proved a much deeper brainwashing than could be scrubbed away by a few novels about educated blacks that were hailed by educated whites. Thurman argued that chasing after the approval of white critics was especially detrimental because they used lower standards to judge black writing. This is why, he complained, the Harlem Renaissance wasn’t a true literary movement. If anything, it was keeping the real talented black writers from being discovered. So, when Du Bois attacked writer Rudolph Fisher for not providing “glimpses of a better class of Negroes” in his realistic novel The Walls of Jericho, Thurman wrote exactly what was wrong with Du Bois’s narrow criteria and the damage that was doing to the black aesthetic:

  Were [Du Bois] a denizen of “Striver’s Row,” scuttling hard up the social ladder, with nothing more important to think about than making money and keeping a high yellow wife bleached out and marcelled, one would laugh at such nonsense and dismiss it from one’s mind. But Dr. Du Bois is not this. He is one of the outstanding Negroes of this or any other generation. He has served his race well; so well, in fact, that the artist in him has been stifled in order that the propagandist may thrive. No one will object to this being called noble and necessary sacrifice, but the days for such sacrifices are gone. The time has come now when the Negro artist can be his true self and pander to the stupidities of no one, either white or black.

  Thurman’s feelings of being an outsider from the mainstream renaissance movement was further complicated by his open homosexuality. Some of the Renaissance’s most respected literary figures were also homosexual or bisexual, including Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Richard Bruce Nugent, and, some say, Langston Hughes, who wrote extensively about gay Harlem. Explains a homosexual character in Blair Niles’s 1931 novel, Strange Brother, “In Harlem I found courage and joy and tolerance. I can be myself there…They know all about me and I don’t have to lie.” In fact, Harlem featured several clubs where gays and lesbians could mingle freely and safely, including Rockland Palace, the Garden of Joy Club, and the Clam House. Performers at these clubs—including Gladys Bentley, Alberta Hunter, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Mabel Hampton, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, and Bessie Smith—sang sensual songs with double-entendre lyrics about gay and lesbian love. Like the hippie movement of the 1960s, the Harlem Renaissance was a time of sexual, as well as artistic and political, experimentation. However, experimentation doesn’t mean acceptance. Mainstream African-Americans were no more tolerant (some historians say even less so) than whites regarding homosexuality. And the old guard decided that their goal of promoting blacks as equals to whites might be compromised, or at least distracted, by support of homosexuality in their writings. Thurman hoped to change that, too.

  Born in Salt Lake City, Thurman was raised in Los Angeles, where he tried to emulate the Harlem Renaissance by launching his own publication for the New Negro, the Outlet. The magazine ceased after six months, and in 1925 Thurman decided to move to Harlem, where he became managing editor of the radical magazine the Messenger, publishing works by pals Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. He left to take a job as the first black editorial assistant on a white publication, the World Tomorrow. That summer, Langston Hughes and Bruce Nugent approached Thurman to edit and help finance their new magazine, Fire!!, which was to feature the young writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, with its goal “to satisfy pagan thirst unadorned.” By presenting literature for its own sake, with no social or political agenda, they would publicly distance themselves somewhat from the more rigid artistic ideals of Du Bois and Locke. The magazine, which offered works by Hughes, Thurman, Nugent, Hurston, and Countee Cullen and was illustrated by Aaron Douglas, made a bold literary statement, though it folded after the first issue. But the gauntlet had been thrown down in no uncertain terms, which Thurman reiterated in an editorial in his next magazine, Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life (which also folded after a single issue), when he declared that he and the writers in the magazine spoke for the new New Negro. Now Thurman and his tight circle of writers and artists would have to prove that their voices spoke more truthfully for their fellow African-Americans.

  The rooming house where Thurman lived on West 136th Street was owned by Iolanthe Sydney, who allowed young artists and writers to stay rent-free because she believed being poor was a necessary ingredient to the artistic impulse. Because of the frequent gatherings here of the new generation of black artists and literary lions—Hurston and Hughes lived here briefly—Hurston nicknamed the place Niggerati Manor (which Thurman portrays in his 1932 novel Infants of the Spring). The bohemian lifestyle within those walls became infamous. One frequent guest claimed that, despite Prohibition, “the bathtubs in the house were always packed with sourmash, while the gin flowed from all the water taps and the flush boxes were filled with needle beer [so named from the practice of injecting alcohol with a needle through the cork of nonalcoholic beer].”

  Thurman’s first play, Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life in Harlem (1929), had a successful run, though it received the kind of reviews that were to be expected whenever a black writer wrote an unflattering portrait of Harlem. Theater critic R. Dana Skinner was disturbed by “the particular way in which this melodrama exploits the worst features of the Negro and depends for its effects solely on the explosions of lust and sensuality.” Other critics found it “exciting” and “constantly entertaining.” This demarcation of responses followed Thurman throughout his literary life. His novels, plays, even the screenplays he wrote when he went back to California for a brief time, never achieved the unqualified acclaim others achieved. His middling literary acceptance, combined with his outsider feelings due to his sexual preference and skin color, left him racked with self-doubt, which was further complicated by poor health due to tuberculosis and alcoholism. When his doctor advised him that his health had deteriorated to such a degree that he needed to immediately quit drinking, Thurman instead returned to New York for a solid month of drinking and partying. His final six months of life were spent in the Welfare Island City Hospital, which he had written an exposé about in his novel The Interne (1932). Like his friend Zora Neale Hurston, he died in poverty. And like Hurston, neither poverty nor death (at the age of thirty-two) prevented him from influencing not only his own generation, but also generation after generation of writers that followed.

  In his 1929 novel, The Blacker the Berry, which comes from the folk saying “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” Thurman explains, through this monologue by a character symbolically named Truman, his conviction that prejudice among African-Americans reveals their deep need to achieve acceptance by the white community and white standards, a flaw that ultimately doomed the Harlem Renaissance to fail:

  “Color prejudice and religion are akin in one respect. Some folks have it and some don’t, and the kernel that is responsible for it is present in all of us, which is to say, that potentially we are all color-prejudiced as long as we remain in this environment.”

  7. The Marvel That is Countee Cullen

  One of the great ironies of the Harlem Renaissance was that, although it was a movement that tried to both unify African-Americans and present a unified image of black Americans, several of its most outstanding spokespersons were individuals who often felt alienated from both the black and white cultures. Countee Cullen (1903–46), considered one of the best poets to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, was raised and educated in a mostly white community. This left him somewhat alienated from the usual experiences of African-Americans, which is why he often refrained in his writing from exploring the typical racial themes, though the poems considered his best dealt directly and eloquently with race. He preferred to be known as a poet rather than a black poet, wanting his audience to focus on the timeless themes of his work rather than limiting them to a particular date and place in history:

  If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET. This is what has hindered the developm
ent of artists among us. Their one note has been the concern with their race. That is all very well, none of us can get away from it. I cannot at times…. But what I mean is this: I shall not write of negro subjects for the purpose of propaganda. That is not what a poet is concerned with. Of course, when the emotion rising out of the fact that I am a negro is strong, I express it. But that is another matter.

  Born in New York City, Cullen was adopted by the Reverend and Mrs. Frederick Ashbury Cullen, who raised him with strong Methodist values. In 1922, he attended New York University, where, for three consecutive years, he won national poetry contests open to all American students. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1925 with degrees in English and French, immediately entering Harvard University to begin work on his master’s degree. By now, he had already published poetry in the black community’s two most important magazines, the Crisis and Opportunity. By 1924, his poetry had also appeared in important white publications such as Harper’s, Century, American Mercury, and Bookman. The same year he graduated college, his first book of poetry, Color, was published to the kind of rave reviews writers don’t dare dream of. Alain Locke declared, “Ladies and gentleman! A genius! Posterity will laugh at us if we do not proclaim him now.” The critic at the Yale Review was even more enamored: “There is no point in measuring him merely by…other Negro poets of the past and present: he must stand or fail beside Shakespeare and Keats and Masefield, Whitman and Poe and Robinson.”

  With such accolades from both black and white critics, with his strong Christian values, and with his neat, formal attire (and his Phi Beta Kappa key always clearly visible), Cullen was quickly embraced by the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. They had found their poster boy for the Talented Tenth. If he had a morose streak in his poetry, and if he rejected being called a “Negro poet,” those were small concessions to be able to display his black face above the label “New Negro” for all the white world to see and admire.

  To make his storybook ascendancy to Harlem intellectual royalty complete, in 1928 Cullen married Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most spectacular weddings Harlem had ever seen. Over a dozen police officers kept order on the streets as a crowd of three thousand guests attended. Cullen saw it as “the symbolic march of young and black America…it was a new race, a new thought, a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world.” Unfortunately, the marriage existed only as a symbol: two months after the wedding, Cullen, who was in love with Harold Jackman, his best man and friend since high school, left with Jackman for Europe—without Yolande. The divorce was finalized two years later.

  By 1930, after producing some of the most memorable poetry of the time, the brightest flame of the Harlem Renaissance was already flickering out. His reliance on traditional poetic forms such as sonnets, which had made him popular in the beginning, was now criticized as being too mired in white culture. His writing was nothing like the jazz-inspired work of friend and rival Langston Hughes. Even after he was no longer Harlem’s Golden Child, he was popular as a speaker, his poems were studied in universities, and much of his verse was set to music by popular composers. Yet, none of this was enough to pay the bills.

  Eventually, he was forced to take a job teaching French and English in Frederick Douglass High School, where he proved to be an inspiration to at least one of his students, future literary great James Baldwin. Though Cullen continued to write poetry and published a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), he also produced children’s literature that was “coauthored” by his cat, Christopher (The Lost Zoo, 1940 and My Lives and How I Lost Them, 1942).

  In 1940, Cullen married Ida Mae Robertson. During the last years of his life, Cullen worked arduously on a play, St. Louis Woman, a musical adaptation of fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps’s novel God Sends Sunday, with music by Harold Arlen (“Over the Rainbow”) and lyrics by Johnny Mercer (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), both white. Opening on Broadway in 1946, the show was reviled by Walter White of the NAACP and other civil rights activists for its unflattering portrayal of African-Americans, a charge that Cullen was not used to receiving since he himself was being presented, like a work of art, as the most flattering portrayal of African-Americans.

  Cullen had always been suspicious of the mixture of race themes with art. He worried that the artist could be cast aside when his art didn’t match the political needs of his supporters. But history has a more democratic way of judging an artist: by the power of his work. And never was Countee Cullen more powerful then in his signature poem, “Yet Do I Marvel,” which still inspires poets eighty years after it was read aloud at the Harlem YMCA:

  I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

  And did He stoop to quibble could tell why

  The little buried mole continues blind,

  Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die, Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

  Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

  If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

  To struggle up a never-ending stair,

  Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

  To catechism by a mind too strewn

  With petty cares to slightly understand

  What awful brain compels His awful hand.

  Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

  To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

  8. The World Speaks of Langston Hughes

  Upon first meeting Langston Hughes (1902–67) in 1925, writer/artist Richard Bruce Nugent described his stunned reaction: “He was a made-to-order Hero for me. He had done everything—all the things young men dream of but never quite get done—worked on ships, gone to exotic places.” This reaction is similar to how Hughes affected almost everyone he met, which, along with his prodigious talent and prolific output, helped make him the most enduringly famous and popular writer to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. It was part of Hughes’s genius that he balanced being a great artist with the ability to move with such ease and respect among the various factions of the Harlem Renaissance, both black and white.

  Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, but spent much of his youth traveling, partially a result of his parents’ lifestyle and partially because of his own wanderlust. His attorney father, convinced that there was no opportunity for blacks in America, moved to Mexico City when Hughes was a child. At first, Hughes’s mother refused to follow; but when Hughes was six years old, she and her son joined her husband in Mexico City. But after an earthquake shook the city, she returned to the United States, dropping young Langston off with her mother while she continued traveling. His grandmother raised him with a strong sense of political awareness: her first husband had died at Harpers Ferry, a member of John Brown’s fighters; her second husband had been a staunch abolitionist. Several years later, after his mother had remarried and had another son, Hughes joined her in Lincoln, Illinois. The family then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where his mother divorced her second husband and moved to Chicago with her son Kit. Hughes remained in Cleveland, alone and on his own at fourteen. This abandonment and subsequent loneliness, he later recalled, drove him to find comfort with “books, and the wonderful world in books.” It also drove him to write, because “when I felt bad, writing kept me from feeling worse.”

  In his junior year of high school Hughes’s gift for poetry emerged. He was named editor of the school yearbook and Class Poet in his senior year. More remarkable, one of his poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which he had scribbled on an envelope while crossing the Mississippi on a train to visit his father, was published in the Crisis. Jessie Fauset later recalled, “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?’” Hughes would never be unknown again. (The poem, one of his most famous, was recited at his funeral.)

  After the publication of his poem, Hughes was eager to travel to Harlem. Upon graduation in 1921, he did just that. When he c
ame out of the subway and saw Harlem for the first time, it was as if he’d entered an enchanted land: “Hundreds of colored people! I wanted to shake hands with them, speak to them. I hadn’t seen any colored people for so long.” He began studies at Columbia University, but soon dropped out to work menial jobs while writing his poetry. Finally, anxious to be on the move again, twenty-one-year-old Hughes took work aboard a cargo ship bound for Africa. From the ship’s deck, Hughes tossed into the sea the books he’d studied at Columbia, keeping only Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

  Hughes approached Africa with a great sense of awe, not unlike his first sighting of Harlem. But the reality was disillusioning: poverty, children being sold, and, worse, when he spoke to native Africans about his and their similarities, they merely pointed to his light skin and wavy hair and said, “You white man! You white man!” He also received a different perspective on Harlem politics: everywhere he stopped, he heard locals speak of Marcus Garvey, “and the Africans did not laugh at Marcus Garvey, as so many people laughed in New York.” Hughes did not travel to Africa with Du Bois’s or Garvey’s grand pan-African agenda, yet when he returned in 1924, he had already seen more of Africa than either of them from their offices in Harlem.

  After only four months, Hughes took work on a ship bound for Holland. He then made his way to Paris, where he lived by working odd jobs. He returned to Harlem and went straight to his friend Countee Cullen’s house. Together they attended an NAACP benefit where Hughes was warmly welcomed by W. E. B. Du Bois and the rest of the Renaissance literati. However, within a few weeks, the close friendship between Cullen and Hughes was shattered; though both wrote about the pain the break caused each of them, neither revealed the specific cause.