by Dorothy West
The first issue of Fire cost a dollar a copy, and the several hundred copies were sold immediately. They were sold, however, to the friends and well-wishers of the editorial staff, whose members included Langsten Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, and others less well known. Much of the material was oversensational. Where the friends of this group could regard these outpourings with indulgence, the wide audience which the magazine needed for its support rejected them because they were too far removed from ordinary, conventional experience. Thurman, as chief editor, had mistaken the shadow for the substance, and after its initial appearance, Fire was extinguished.
After a two-year interval, Harlem, subtitled A Forum of Negro Life, appeared. With a creditable sum at his disposal, Thurman unwisely decided to run the magazine on a large scale. He rented an office on Seventh Avenue, installed a telephone, and called in several young writers without commitments to help with the business of running the magazine. Carfare, cigarettes, occasional meals, and loans rapidly depleted their capital.
Aware now that any successful magazine must of necessity draw its support from a wide audience rather than from a select group, Harlem was less esoteric than Fire had been, and its appeal was broader. It was twenty-five cents a copy, and included older writers among its contributors. While the magazine was not lacking in favorable response from readers, expenses increased disproportionately with returns on distribution. After the second issue, Harlem folded.
The late Elisabeth Marbury was one of the few whites who met with Thurman’s wholehearted approval. He met her one afternoon when he went with a group of writing friends to her home in Sutton Place. She received them like Queen Victoria on her throne, and Thurman was not amused. She was more nearly genuine than anyone he had lately met, and her tongue was as sharp as his. She liked Thurman best—though he made no effort to outshine the others—and wanted a hand in his writing career. She believed enough in his talent to advance him a generous sum to keep him in food and rent while he completed a novel. The novel was Infants of the Spring. His tribute is that she is nowhere in its pages.
In this novel is summed up Thurman’s disillusion with the New York years. He writes of a typical party, “…the drunken revelry began to sicken him. The insanity of the party, the insanity of its implications, threatened his own sanity. It is going to be necessary, he thought, to have another emancipation to deliver the emancipated Negro from a new kind of slavery.”
Infants of the Spring was published when Thurman was thirty-two years old, two years before his untimely death. He knew now very definitely that he did not have the elements of genius. He did not even know whether or not he was a first-rate writer. He had begun to ponder the one-book appearance of Negro writers, and wondered if it was “the result of some deep-rooted complex or merely indicative of a lack of talent.”
The truth was that for the most part the young writers of the period were not ready for publication. Thurman’s two novels give evidence of this immaturity and incomplete experience. At that time publishers were vying with each other to bring out Negro books. Zora Neale Hurston, now an established novelist, had written a half dozen creditable short stories. Publishers pressed her for a full-length manuscript. She stoutly maintained that she was not ready to affix her name to a novel. Her contemporaries, including Thurman, insisted that she was simply lazy, and predicted that she would peter out as a writer.
Thurman knew that the traditional attitude of white America, despite its shift in emphasis during the period, was still such as to discourage by overpraise and specious evaluation any honest Negro writer’s productive impulses. Yet he allowed himself to be exploited, and has left as heritage two imperfect books.
In 1933 he was chief editor of the editorial staff at the Macaulay Company. Through the publishers he met their lawyer-brother, A. A. Furman, and with him began his second collaboration, this time on a novel titled Interne. It was Furman’s first novel and Thurman’s last printed work. The book had little to offer save its sensational exposé of conditions on Welfare Island. It was cheap and poorly written. The characters were white, and of a class about which Thurman could know very little. There were many who did not believe he had a hand in writing this book, but his scrapbook gives evidence of material collected. He visited Welfare Island and for the first time in his New York years was shocked and horrified. He came away loud and bitter in his denunciation, and with the avowal never to set foot again in the place.
Furman introduced him to Bryan Foy, who had lately arrived from Hollywood, where he had been engaged in the making of class “B” pictures. Thurman’s work with Macfadden Publications had taught him what a large part of the public wanted. He was editor of Macaulay’s, successfully turning out “popular” fiction. These facts, with Thurman’s congeniality, sold him to Foy. They talked about a contract over dinner in a downtown restaurant. It amused Thurman very much that, although John Barrymore’s profile was on prominent display at a nearby table, it was he who was the object of all the ogling.
He left New York in February of 1934 with a contract from Foy Productions, Ltd., in his pocket. His first scenario was High School Girl, which had a fair run at the Astor. His second was Tomorrow’s Children, a film on sterilization which was generally banned in New York. The story sessions in Hollywood were mad, and Thurman’s nerves were shot. He hated the long-drawn-out, senseless discussions. On one occasion he became acutely ill through sheer physical revolt at the insane antics of his colleagues.
It was June when a doctor on the West Coast cautioned him about his health. He was losing weight and a cold he had caught one night on the beach persisted. He and the joy-seekers with whom he had quickly become allied would bathe and imbibe and, more often than not, fall asleep on the beach in their wet bathing suits and wake hours later in a chilly dawn.
Thurman knew that he had tuberculosis, but refused to consider living by rules for the rest of what might be a long dull life. Having been advised that he must give up all indulgences, he reasoned that death might come quickly if he didn’t. Twice before he had attempted melodramatic suicides, and they had been fun rather than funereal. This time there would be no human hand to snatch him back from a theatrical finish.
He flew to New York, determined that his end should be spectacular. He arrived on a hot summer day in a flamboyant Hollywoodian costume and sounded an alarm on Seventh Avenue. He rounded up his friends, laughed more loudly than he ever had before, told unprintable tales of the cinema city, and refused to be left alone for a minute.
He was frightened and determined not to admit it. He got drunk, and stayed drunk, and talked very much and laughed very much, and would not face himself alone, nor sleep alone, nor say one serious thing.
One day he found himself faced with a solitary hour. After a tortured fifteen minutes which liquor could not lull, he climbed out uncertainly onto the fire escape and mounted the steps to the upstairs flat of a friend. She was not at home, and he knew that she would not be, but her window was open.
He went in, found that he did not feel so lonely among less familiar things, flung himself down on the unmade divan, tossed for a bit, and slept. When the friend returned she was neither surprised nor startled. She made him hot milk, which he drank with a grimace, and did not send him packing until he was satisfied that his unlocked door had been entered by the ghouls that gathered nightly for the death watch.
Suddenly he collapsed. Later, he found himself recovered from unconsciousness, and not dead. On a hot July first he lay in the incurable ward on Welfare Island. For six long months he lay there. They were the bitterest months of his life. Death was to be drawn out, and that last riotous month was only making it harder. He was too weak for anything but contemplation, and his thoughts, turning inward, probed little but waste. His friends fell away. Only a few visited irregularly. Only two continued faithful to the harrowing end in late December.
It was these two schoolteacher friends who were notified of his death. It was they who buried him.
On Christmas Eve his wasted body lay in a Harlem funeral parlor. His family had telegraphed their inability to come East. His former wife, who learned of his death on the day of his burial, came hastily to his rites in a red coat.
So Thurman lived and died, leaving no memorable record of his writing, but remaining as the most symbolic figure of the literary “renaissance” in Harlem. His death caused the first break in the ranks of the “New Negro.” Assembled at the funeral in solemn silence, older, hardly wiser, they were reminded for the first time of their lack of immortality.
A DAY LOST IS A DAY GONE FOREVER
There came a day in these later years of my life when I entered the hospital as an inpatient for the first time, with an operation scheduled for the next morning. Once various forms were signed, I was separated from my free will, led down the corridors into a room which was now to be the boundary of my existence, told to surrender my clothes, handed that comic invention, the hospital gown, and sent to bed in broad daylight like a child being stripped of her privileges.
In this unflattering way so ended my charmed existence of never having anything wrong with me that required a surgeon’s knife. I trusted the surgeon’s skills. His reputation confirmed his excellence. When we met in his office for the first time, there was a mutual liking. When his examination corroborated my doctor’s opinion that surgery was advisable, I accepted the wisdom of that. The operation was said to be routine. There was no foreseeable reason for anything to go wrong.
Nevertheless there was an undercurrent of fear in me that I did not let show. It was not the surgery that I dreaded. It was the anesthesia, the settling into a long sleep with no fixed limitation. Suppose I couldn’t wake up. Suppose my vital signs diminished. There, like my mother before me, I would lie between two worlds, the one I knew and fiercely treasured, and one in whose ranks I had no wish to be included.
It seemed to me that I was awake all night, remembering my mother and the hours of her dying, and knowing that, in my state of surrender, I too would have no strength to break death’s hold. And for me there would be no unseen force to reach out in resurrection.
I must have slept a little, for the nurse had to wake me to prepare me for the stretcher, which was presently rolling me along the busy corridors to the operating area. It felt very strange to be exposed to so many disinterested eyes.
On my arrival a doctor appeared and introduced himself to me as my anesthetist. Both of us made graceful small talk to ease this sudden intimacy of strangers. Then he was ready to put me under. I closed my eyes and tried to blot out of my mind the recurring image of my mother that had so unsettled my night. Then suddenly I was enveloped in nothingness and the remembering stopped.
My operation was a success from start to suture. I wakened in due time, back in my room, not even remembering at first that I had ever left it. For there was no aftermath of pain, no feeling that death had stood close by. It had not been my bitter inheritance to suffer my mother’s unrelenting sleep that propelled her hour by doomed hour toward the hell of dying for no reason that made sense.
The hospital had gone on alert. The good doctors and the good nurses were rushing back and forth, trying everything their training had taught them to make my mother live.
Until the day before her operation when she was signed in at the hospital, my mother, like me, had never been an inpatient. If she thought about hospitals at all, I suspect she thought of them as way stops for the elderly on their way to heaven. And she was in no hurry. She had a love affair with life. There was nothing more beautiful to her than a child, a flower, a summer’s day, a friend. On the other hand heaven was an unknown risk.
The change in the pattern of her days came on an innocent winter morning when she was in the backyard feeding the birds. In a moment of inattention she tripped over a stone and fell. She picked herself up, continued to scatter seed for the birds who fed on the ground, then filled the hanging feeders for those birds who preferred to feast above ground and not have to be on constant watch for the neighborhood cats.
When she returned to the house, wisdom told her to call her doctor. The jolt of her fall had loosened a pain inside her more intense than the soreness of her surface bruises. I think she had felt warnings of that pain before, but not to that extent of hurting, and she had pushed it out of her mind, testing the theory that mind could overcome matter.
The doctor came and examined her. He knew her essential strength of mind and body. He did not mince words. He told her he was going to admit her to the hospital immediately for an operation that all signs seemed to indicate was imperative. It was all so sudden that I forgot, as did she, a tale that she had told me more than once about a frightening experience she had gone through when she was eighteen. To us both my mother in her sixties was so far distant from that girl in Springfield that she did not enter our thinking.
It was only when my mother was in the agony of dying and her death began to invade my own body, turning my flesh to ice, that I remembered the story.
When my mother was eighteen, with radiant health and a head full of dreams of a long and happy life, a tooth began to give her trouble. When home remedies were of no help and the pain persisted, she made an appointment with a dentist, who, upon examination, advised her that the tooth should be extracted.
She had no concern except the hope that it would cost no more than she had in her purse. When she was seated in the chair ether was administered, her eyes closed, the numbness set in, and the extraction began and ended as expected. So it appeared until the dentist began to talk to my mother and she didn’t answer.
He raised his voice and said, “You can open your eyes now, it’s all over. If you feel a bit groggy just sit awhile. It will soon pass.”
Somewhere deep the words took root for later remembering though she could give no conscious sign of having heard. The dentist began to feel uneasy. He called her name sharply, but she did not respond. He opened a window, but the rush of air did not rouse her. He even tried lightly slapping her face, but still no reaction.
Time passed, and she did not stir. More time passed, and she went on sleeping. He did not want to call a colleague or a doctor and have them speculate on what he had done wrong. But he did not want to regret not having called them. It was a real dilemma.
Mercifully my mother waked, her strong, young body refusing to let her die with so much living undone. She snapped back into being, the pallor fading in her cheeks, the color rising, her hands no longer cold to the touch.
When my mother had her operation, she was, of course, put under ether, the anesthetic then in general use. Throughout her operation I sat in the waiting room with my good neighbor, Robert, whose blood was my mother’s type as mine was not. In those years there was no blood bank in the hospital.
Robert, by nature a quiet man, a Yankee of generations of Yankees, did not expect me to make small talk. To keep a confident expression on my face, to smile in a reassuring way whenever our eyes met was the price I had to pay for being an adult. And Robert’s being there when there were a dozen other things he had to do was the price he had to pay for being a caring person.
At last I saw my mother being wheeled out of the operating room. The surgeon came toward me smiling and was very pleased to tell me that the operation had been a complete success. In answer to my question about going to see my mother, he advised me that it was better to wait until the next day. When she waked, she would be tired and perhaps disoriented. It would be less strain for both of us if I gave her until tomorrow to get back to being herself.
Robert and I left the hospital; he was relieved for me and glad to have my good news to pass on to his wife, I expressing my gratitude for the comfort his presence had given me. We parted, he to go back to work, I to go home and do some walk-about chores to help me unwind.
But I could not erase the picture of my mother being wheeled down the corridor, her face without color, her body so still. She, who never wanted me to catch her sleeping ever since she overhe
ard me say when I was five that mothers stayed awake all night to watch over their children, she was now rolling past me in a faraway world of her own, indifferent to my presence.
I went about the rest of the day trying to do some writing, but not really able to focus on anything that needed my full attention. I was really waiting for night to come and go, and morning to follow, so that my mother would be herself again in the world that she, as a child, had rushed outside to meet in the country morning, flinging her arms wide to gather every tree, every bird, every flower, every living thing around her in her fierce embrace.
Night came, and I was glad to go upstairs and get in bed with a book undemanding of my closest attention, and lull myself to sleep with the rhythm of its words. Just as I was beginning to drift into forgetfulness, my feet began to get cold. I rubbed them together in the hope that they would warm each other. Instead the cold began to creep up my legs.
I got up to check the house. Perhaps I had forgotten to lock the front door and it had blown open, or maybe a window had blown out, or the heating system had fouled itself up. But I found nothing at fault, and nothing was cold to my touch.
I went back to bed, and under the warm covers the cold continued to creep up my legs like no cold I had ever experienced. I had spent a winter in Moscow, where for a week the temperature was twenty-eight degrees below zero. I had cheerfully walked its streets while my American companions ran from tram to hotel with tears streaming down their cheeks.
