by Carla Kaplan
In 1923, Gwendolyn Bennett’s poem “Heritage,” published in Opportunity, made clear how emotional this “emotional inheritance” could be. Every stanza of her poem, which imagines African palm trees, roads, ruins, flowers, rivers, and villages, begins with the refrain “I want.” “I want to see,” “I want to hear,” the speaker laments. She wants to feel that under “a minstrel smile” is an authentic blackness to which she can lay claim with an authority grounded in ancestral legacy. All the repeated “wanting,” however, makes clear how unsure she is.
Countée Cullen’s “Heritage” probably expressed those mixed sentiments best. It spoke to the central problem: did “race” exist, and, if so, what grounded it? If not blood or biological essence, might race inhere in a shared, even if also distant, history? In Cullen’s poem, a modern urban speaker returns almost obsessively to an imaginary Africa in the hope that it might contain a meaningful link to his present. He feels skeptical. “What is last year’s snow to me / Last year’s anything?” he asks.
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
The speaker feels a strong connection to Africa but criticizes himself for what he also sees as a flight of imagination. Again and again, the poem repeats the word “lie” to suggest both passivity and falsehood.
. . . So I lie, who always hear,
Though I cram against my ear
Both my thumbs and keep them there,
Great drums throbbing through the air.
Africa seems like a story.
Africa? A book one thumbs
Listlessly till slumber comes . . .
But it is a story, or fiction, that haunts and disturbs him, one he cannot set aside by a simple act of will.
So I lie, who find no peace
Night or day, no slight release
From the unremittant beat
Made by cruel padded feet
Walking through my body’s street.
Up and down they go, and back,
Treading out a jungle track.
So Africa was a problematic resource, at best. The Great Migration from the southern states to the northern had, over two decades, brought a population to Harlem that, as Alain Locke described it in The New Negro, was not “merely the largest Negro community in the world” but also the most diverse. “It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American . . . the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives.” Did such a diverse people really share a “heritage”?
And how to avoid sounding like the primitivists? Wouldn’t they just thrill to “wild barbaric birds . . . massive jungle herds . . . jungle boys and girls in love”? What Harlemite could afford to be so dreamy and reductionist? Cullen’s speaker is unsure if Africa is a resource. Indeed, the poem stresses the repeated word “lie” to suggest how delusional such fantasies might be. Modern primitivists were all too sure of Africa. In the minds of primitivists such as Charlotte Osgood Mason, modern Harlemites unquestionably were vessels for a jungle sensibility that might—that she hoped would—erupt at any moment into America’s “flaming pathway” out of modernity’s failures.
At the same time, with such a potentially rich resource to draw on and such a paucity of other American resources, what Harlemite could afford not to look to Africa? Doing so was crucial to the work of “revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments.” The nation’s folklore craze—anthropologist Margaret Mead later called it a “search-and-rescue” mission to preserve the roots of American culture—made the advantage of a reclaimed African “heritage” too rich to ignore. If African Americans could successfully seize that terrain, they would have an ironclad claim for recognition of their cultural patrimony at a time when cultural achievements were especially highly valued.
One of the problems of turning to Africa, however, was how many whites had fallen in love with an African ideal. Primitivism, a mostly white and highly idealized view of blacks, was an especially knotty collection of ideas in this context. Primitivists often carried on a tradition of romantic racialism that saw blackness as an antidote to atomistic, joyless modern life, based on ideas of blacks as a more childlike and natural people. Their influence could be felt throughout American culture from advertising to high art, making the primitivist welter of celebration and condescension unavoidable for blacks forced to contend with it. Some black leaders found it useful to be celebrated by Pablo Picasso or Gertrude Stein, who at least reversed the negative values usually assigned to blackness. Black-loving whites, such as Edna Margaret Johnson, on “bended knee” to a black “God of Life,” often bought into the idea that “Nordic” culture was “pallid” but black culture was vibrant, exciting, even healing for whites. But primitivists generally did not challenge the idea that such racial characterizations could be made in the first place. Hence, many white “friends of the Negro” who promoted such ideas were unpredictable political allies, at best.
Cullen’s speaker keeps asking whether a Negro identity can be grounded in African origins, deeply aware of the emotional charge that possibility carries for an alienated modern urbanite. Rather than take for granted that Africa will help fix his woes, he repeats the refrain “What is Africa to me?” again and again. The poem refuses to resolve Harlem’s debate over whether race is an essence, a social construction, or, alternatively, an ethics—a moral and ethical obligation to one’s “own” people. Unable to decide, he struggles for personal “peace” and wonders if playing a “double part” might serve just as well as anything else. In doing so, he winks at his own project. Grounding his identity, apparently, means inventing it.
That was Harlem’s Pandora’s box in the 1920s and 1930s. If origins were invented, then what did “authenticity” mean? Why couldn’t a white writer create as authentic a portrait of black life as a black writer? What separated Fannie Hurst’s view of passing from Walter White’s or Nella Larsen’s? What distinguished the ideas of blackness of white southern writers such as Julia Peterkin and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings from those of writers such as Langston Hughes? Like so much of Harlem at this time, Cullen’s speaker alternates between being tortured by those questions and being tired of them.
“Grabbing Our Stuff and Ruining It”: Whites Writing Black
The white people are pushing themselves among the colored.
—Chandler Owen, “The Black and Tan Cabaret”
At a time when literature was the social currency of public debate, playing a role now shared by radio, television, cinema, and the Internet, literature and the arts were at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. Believing that accurate representations of blacks would turn the tide of American racism, black artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance “promoted poetry, prose, painting and music as if their lives depended on it.” In the words of diplomat, writer, editor, and activist James Weldon Johnson, “the final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. . . . ‘Through his artistic efforts the Negro is smashing the race barriers faster than he has ever done through any other method.’” Given those stakes, it should not be surprising that Harlem’s black writers watched with dismay as white writers including Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Carl Van Vechten, Paul Green, Eugene O’Neill, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Fannie Hurst became more successful for depicting black life than they were.
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br /> No book ignited as much of a firestorm in Harlem as Van Vechten’s 1926 novel, Nigger Heaven. Having lauded the “wealth of novel, erotic, picturesque material” available to the artist who tackles “the squalor of Negro life, the vice of Negro life,” Van Vechten evidently decided to exploit the material himself. Nigger Heaven is a fairly predictable story of a troubled romance between a black Harlem librarian and her would-be writer lover as they battle racism in New York against a violent and sometimes sensationalized backdrop of Harlem’s nightlife. Most of the novel is sympathetic to middle-class blacks and a serious treatment of such important Harlem Renaissance themes as interracial marriage, passing, racial solidarity, patronage, the idea of Harlem as “a sort of Mecca,” the “one-drop rule,” race discrimination, primitivism, and black arts. But the opening pages in particular are peopled with enough sensational Harlem figures—“jigchasers,” “high yellows,” “Bolito” players, “ofays,” “dicties,” “pink-chasers,” “bulldikers,” “arnchies,” “creepers,” and “Miss Annies”—to necessitate a “Glossary of Negro Words and Phrases” for white readers. Van Vechten’s black people have “a primitive birthright . . . that all civilized races were struggling to get back to . . . this love of drums, of exciting rhythms, this naïve delight in glowing colour . . . this warm sexual emotion.”
Some black friends supported the book—Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and James Weldon Johnson among them. “To say that Carl Van Vechten has harmed Negro creative activities is sheer poppycock,” Hughes insisted. But some were outraged at Van Vechten’s assumption of black racial privileges. The novel’s title, meant as an ironic metaphor for social segregation (a “nigger heaven” being a segregated balcony in a theater or orchestra hall), occasioned such outrage that many of Van Vechten’s harshest critics never, in fact, read the book. Du Bois spoke for many of Van Vechten’s detractors (and not a few of his black friends as well) when he complained that Van Vechten had displayed “exceptionally bad manners” in using “cheap melodrama” to portray Harlem as just the “wildly, barbaric drunken orgy” white revelers imagined. For Du Bois, the title was not an act of solidarity or irony but an “affront” and a “blow in the face.” To Van Vechten’s delight (he loved being scandalous), the novel was banned in Boston. He was also banned from the Harlem nightclub Small’s Paradise, about which he was not delighted at all. And The Pittsburgh Courier, the most important black newspaper in the country, pulled its advertisements for the book.
Even before controversy erupted over Nigger Heaven, writers such as Eugene O’Neill and Julia Peterkin were staking their fortunes on representing blacks. Peterkin, for example, whose “rich” life on a former slave plantation had given her “plenty of material,” spoke for numerous white writers when she declared that “Negro” culture just made for better literature than white society:
I have lived among the Negroes. I like them. They are my friends. . . . These black friends of mine live more in one Saturday night than I do in five years. I envy them, and I guess as I cannot be them, I seek satisfaction in trying to record them. . . . I shall never write of white people. Their lives are not so colorful.
Peterkin’s depictions of Gullah blacks, rather than resulting in her being banned from Harlem nightclubs, actually earned her a special status in Harlem, where she was invited to review work by black writers such as Langston Hughes, feted by NAACP officials Amy and Joel Spingarn, and praised by black critic and folklorist Sterling Brown, who applauded her “uncanny insight into the ways of our folks” and declared that there could be “few better mentors” for black writers. When Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary, a romantic postslavery vision of black cotton pickers—“the long rows, laughing, talking . . . musical voices . . . the picking is easy. . . . Every work-day is a holiday”—won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, many in Harlem felt compelled to read the book, and it became one of the two most popular books at Ernestine Rose’s Harlem branch library. New Negro stalwart Alain Locke ranked it as every bit as successful in getting to the “bone and marrow of [black] life” as works by black writers.
To many, nevertheless, the overwhelming success of white writers felt like a return to the days of minstrelsy, when, to represent themselves, they had had to “black up” into an exaggerated, white-defined version of themselves. In a letter to Jamaican writer Claude McKay, Harold Jackman, a young black Harlemite and Countée Cullen’s intimate, wrote, “Tell me, frankly, do you think colored people feel as primitive as many writers describe them as feeling when they hear jazz? . . . There is so much hokum and myth about the Negro these days (since the Negro Renaissance, as it is called) that if a thinking person doesn’t watch himself, he is liable to believe it.” For white writers, though, it was a great opportunity. “Damn it, man,” Sherwood Anderson wrote to H. L. Mencken, “if I could really get inside the niggers and write about them with some intelligence, I’d be willing to be hanged later and perhaps would be.” White editors and publishers were offering enormous advances for “authentic” depictions of black Harlem. And they determined what qualified as black.
Theater seemed to be one of the first arts in which blacks could break significant ground. Many felt that the black composers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s successful 1921 musical Shuffle Along, which featured an all-black cast, was especially important in expanding the cultural space available to black people. Black performers such as Charles Gilpin, Rose McClendon (who would later star in Annie Nathan Meyer’s play Black Souls), Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Frank Wilson, Ethel Waters, and Eubie Blake starred in a range of successful plays about black life: Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in 1920 and All God’s Chillun Got Wings in 1924, Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom in 1926, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy in 1927, Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds in 1928, and Annie Nathan Meyer’s Black Souls in 1932. The problem was that all these playwrights were white. Black dramatist Montgomery Gregory, a foundational figure in the development of a national black theater, argued that “Negro theater . . . must come from the Negro himself, as he alone can truly express the soul of his people.” But for some black critics and theater people, the “Negro plays” by white authors offered advantages. For them, any drama that stepped away from what Du Bois called the “silly songs and leg shows” of minstrelsy had value as an authentic “Negro drama,” regardless of its author’s race. Often “held out as inspiration and challenge,” such white plays were frequently “acclaimed by critics as ‘Negro drama.’” Black critic Esther Fulks Scott called the plays “an ideal means of fostering racial co-operation.” And black actress Eulalie Spence wrote that “these writers have been a great inspiration. . . . They have pointed the way and heralded a new dawn.” Even those who were most skeptical usually found something to praise. Du Bois maintained that a “Negro theatre” should be “About us . . . By us . . . For us” and called O’Neill’s black characters “white theatrical, psychological, and commercial stereotypes.” But he also called O’Neill a “genius” who “dignified” Negro drama. Alain Locke agreed. This is not to say that everyone in Harlem accepted the category of the white-authored “Negro play.” Theophilus Lewis, one of the most important black drama critics of his day, was insistent that “Negro drama” mean “plays written by Negro authors.”
The question of black representation in the arts was the basis of a symposium entitled “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?” which ran monthly in The Crisis for most of 1926. It not only invited whites to weigh in on how blacks should be portrayed; it also invited Van Vechten—easily the most controversial white man in Harlem—to pen most of the questions. (For example, “Are artists or publishers under any obligations to depict people at their best?” “What is the best response to negative stereotypes?” “Is there a danger in the fascination with lower-class Negro life?”) Dominating the symposium were whites such as H. L. Mencken, DuBose Heyward, Joel Spingarn, Mary White Ovington, publisher Alfred A. Knopf, poet Vachel Lindsay, John Farrar (founde
r of Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Julia Peterkin, and others.
In her response, Julia Peterkin maintained that “the crying need among Negroes is a development in them of racial pride.” “The Negro is racially different in many essential particulars from his fellow mortals of another color,” she went on, and his art needed to reflect that difference. She then detailed the black “type” most “worthy of admiration and honor,” the type on which she felt black writers should focus. The “Mammy,” she maintained, is a “credit” to the race and “a man who is not proud that he belongs to a race that has produced the Negro Mammy of the South is not and can never be either an educated man or a gentleman.” At the end of her response, she offered to answer the question of why she wrote about black people and found them so fascinating: “I write about Negroes because they represent human nature obscured by so little veneer; human nature groping among its instinctive impulses and in an environment which is tragically primitive and often unutterably pathetic.”
