The New Negro Chapter - Harlem Renaissance - Nathan Huggins.pdf

2 The New Negro The decade of the 1920s, with the Great War over, was one of general liberation; everything seemed in flux. America was self-conscious about a newness and change which had actually begun in the years before America’s entry into the European war. This had been the theme of Van Wyck Br...

2 The New Negro The decade of the 1920s, with the Great War over, was one of general liberation; everything seemed in flux. America was self-conscious about a newness and change which had actually begun in the years before America’s entry into the European war. This had been the theme of Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming of Age (1915). Brooks announced that American arts and letters were at last free from the fetters of provincialism and Puritanism. The bracing winds from Europe had propelled the becalmed American culture and set it loose to find its own course. Van Wyck Brooks and the young intellectuals who had engaged in the prewar rebellion went into the war convinced that the day of American art and letters was at hand.1 Despite the disillusionment that followed wartime idealism, the 1920s continued some of this spirit of emancipation, innovation, and newness. The aura of the postwar decade, epitomized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “younger generation” and the Jazz Age, was reflected among Negro intellectuals too. They created the “New Negro.” By the end of the war, in 1919, Afro-Americans who called themselves radicals were already serving notice that the Negro of postwar America was going to be much more militant than his prewar brother. The Messenger had insisted that the “new style” Negro would not accept accommodation or ignore grievances even in the interest of the war. The Negro would no longer “turn the other cheek,” be modest and unassuming. He would answer violence with violence rather than with meek though moral protests and requests for justice. That magazine had applauded the display of violence by Negroes in the recent racial disturbances in Longview, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. His willingness to fight showed that the New Negro was as anxious to make “America safe for himself” as he had been to make the world safe for democracy. W. A. Domingo, Jamaican and sometime contributor to Garvey’s Negro World, tried to define the New Negro, this new man, in the Messenger August 1920 issue. In politics, Domingo claimed, the New Negro “cannot be lulled into a false sense of security with political spoils and patronage. The job is not the price of his vote.” His labor was not to be exploited as the Old Negro’s had been in the past. But, above all, he would insist on “absolute and unequivocal social equality” which would be achieved by identifying his interests with those of the working classes. The Negro was mainly a worker, so his new leaders would reject association with capitalism and the bourgeoisie and support a labor party. He would focus on objectives that were to his immediate economic interest, working-men’s goals: shorter working hours, higher wages, more jobs. He would join white labor unions where he could; he would form his own when white unions discriminated. He would educate himself and others in order to facilitate just race relations, but he would use “physical action in self-defense.” To Domingo, the New Negro’s methods were summed up in the rejection of the “old Crowd Negroes’” counsel of the “doctrine of non-resistance.” 2 Domingo, of course, viewed this new man through the eyes of a socialist, and so he added an economic class-consciousness. Few other Negro spokesmen talked in terms of a labor party as a viable political vehicle. But all would agree with Domingo on the broad strokes of the portrait. The New Negro was militant and self-assertive. He would not be content with second-class citizenship and only vague promises for a better future. And all agreed that the war had much to do with the changes. All Americans had just participated in a moral crusade to make political justice and democracy a reality to men throughout the world. American Negroes had joined in that struggle with the conscious intent of making this their fight too. They had made their contribution as military men, they had served their nation, and now they would insist on being treated like full citizens. Whatever they had thought of the war, Negro political leaders believed that it had bought the Negro some credit in American society; it had broadened him, and had given him a feeling of his power. This new militancy was trumpeted to New York City and to America at large by the triumphal return of New York’s 15th Infantry Regiment from Europe. An organization of Negro volunteers, it had been mustered into United States service in July 1917, only to suffer a series of official rejections and indignities lasting until the end of its service. The army’s reluctance to permit black combat troops under its command resulted in this unit’s being attached to the French Army as the 369th Regiment. Even so, white American anxiety about Negroes in the war was so acute that the United States Army had circulated among the French the famous document of August 1918: Secret Information Concerning Black Troops. This circular warned against black and white fraternization, lest Negroes rape French women. It also cautioned French officers and men against treating American Negroes in other than the most official and perfunctory way. Yet, despite much provocation and the persistent German propaganda which harped on American racism, the 369th Regiment achieved an outstanding record of valor and distinction in combat. It was the first Allied unit to reach the Rhine. It was the first American regiment in the French Army during the war (it had the longest service, therefore). It was in the trenches for 191 days. The entire unit was awarded the Croix de Guerre for its action at Maison-en-Champagne, and 171 officers and enlisted men were cited for the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor for exceptional bravery in action. Nevertheless, this regiment of New York Negroes was brutally harassed by American military police while they awaited ships to return to the United States. Their victory parade in New York City, February 17, 1919, signaled something more, therefore, than the return of soldiers from the war. These men had done more than most to prove themselves men and Americans, and they accomplished their feats under the most trying circumstances. They had come close, but they had never succumbed to their rage. They had avoided, sometimes quite narrowly, the violent reaction to bigotry and the subsequent punishment that had befallen the 24th Infantry Regiment at Houston, Texas. They had gone through it all and brought back victory without blemish. It must have been a proud day for them and for the black New Yorkers who watched them.3 They marched down Fifth Avenue in massive company phalanxes. Black Americans, fighting men. Lt. James Europe’s band, which had made itself and the new American jazz famous throughout France, led them down the broad avenue under flags and banners reading: OUR HEROES— WELCOME HOME. Through throngs of cheering New Yorkers they marched, through the newly erected victory arch at 25th Street, past the Public Library, continuing up Fifth Avenue to 110th Street and the end of Central Park. Then it was over to Lenox Avenue and up that street, through Harlem (through home) to 145th Street. On these uptown streets, they changed their tight phalanx to an open formation. The cheering crowds were darker with familiar accents; they called out names and ran within the ranks to touch the men. Jim Europe’s band of sixty brass and reed, thirty trumpet and drum, swung into “Here Comes My Daddy Now”; all Harlem went wild. For a moment—a day or two, or a week—Harlem, and all of New York, thought these black men were heroes. Negroes cannot be blamed for thinking that the glory would last, that this martial and manly spirit, these honors deserved and won, would forever deny to white Americans the chance to treat Negroes as less than men and citizens. Such expectations were part of the stuff that fed the conception of the New Negro. The irony was considerable. Among other things, the postwar years saw a spectacular revival of racism; the new Ku Klux Klan found white support throughout the country, and violence against Negroes increased. Apparently, white Americans believed in the New Negro as much as black Americans did; he was a threat to one as much as a hope to the other. The black man’s metamorphosis was assumed by everyone, and thoughtful people knew that the change would have a profound effect not only on the American Negro but on American culture and, indeed, the multi-colored world itself. Alain Locke, a dapper, gentle, nut-brown man, a Rhodes Scholar, and professor of philosophy at Howard University saw no limit to the transformation. He brought together a varied group of essays, stories, poems, and pictures in The New Negro (1925), all searching to define what was assumed to be a grand cultural flux. Locke’s editing of and contribution to this volume and his energetic championing of the intellectual achievement of Negroes in the 1920s made him the father of the New Negro and the so-called Harlem Renaissance.4 Locke insisted that a change in the Negro had occurred far beyond the measurement of the sociologist. The appearance of the New Negro seemed sudden and shocking only because the Old Negro had long since been a shadow and fiction, preserved in white minds through sentimentalism and reaction. The Negro, because he had found it paid, helped perpetuate this fiction through protective social mimicry. “So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.” Even the Negro intellectual tended to see himself as a social problem, Locke argued. He had to make his appeal in the face of the unjust stereotype of his enemies and the equally questionable stereotypes of his friends. In neither case could he see himself as he really was. “His shadow, so to speak, was more real to him than his personality.” But a renewed sense of self-respect was forcing the Negro to look at himself afresh, to reject the stereotypes and cliches, and to insist on integrity of race and personality. As Locke saw it, the traditional and fictional view of the Negro had been made embarrassingly obsolete by the changes in the realities of Negro life. The migration that had pulled the Negro out of the South, putting him in the Midwest and East, had made him an urban and industrial man. Only the most obtuse and sentimental could continue to find “aunties,” “uncles,” “mammies,” Uncle Toms, and Samboes, in modern city life. The city made a difference, in Locke’s mind, because it forced the Negro from the simple to the complex life, from rural homogeneity to urban pluralism; he was forced to see himself in broad and sophisticated terms. Harlem was a perfect example. Not only was it the “largest Negro community in the world,” but it brought together black men of the most diverse backgrounds and interests. There were Africans and West Indians as well as Negroes from the south and north of the United States. There were city men, town men, and village men; “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 and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another.” This shared experience, Locke held, was race-building. Until that moment, he insisted, the Negro had been a race more in name than in fact, “more in sentiment than in experience.” What had defined them as a race was a common condition and a common problem. What was needed to make a race, however, was a common consciousness and a life in common. Life in the city, life in Harlem, would satisfy that need. “In Harlem,” he wrote, “Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital.” Harlem was for the New Negro what Dublin was to the New Ireland, Prague to the New Czechoslovakia, and Belgrade to the New Yugoslavia. Race-building, according to Locke, was forcing the Negro to reject old assumptions and old images. If the white man had erred in his defining the Negro in order to justify his treatment of him, the Negro too often had found his treatment an excuse for his condition. The new social sciences were taking a hard look at the realities, and the intelligent Negro would welcome the hard-eyed scientific evaluation in place of the soft and crippling judgment of the philanthropist. All racial groups had to be weaned from some dependency, and the Negro was no exception. Locke argued that the Negro’s time had come to free himself from the patronizing and distant philanthropy of sentimental white society. The New Negro’s race consciousness and racial cooperation were clear indications that his time had come to be a race, to be free and self-assertive. While expressed in racial and collective terms, Locke’s view of the New Negro was strikingly familiar, an iteration of very traditional values of self-sufficiency and selfhelp, as American as the Puritans and the “self-reliance” of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whatever else he was then, as Locke explained him, the New Negro was an assertion of America. So, Alain Locke believed that the profound changes in the American Negro had to do with the freeing of himself from the fictions of his past and the rediscovery of himself. He had to put away the protective coloring of the mimicking minstrel and find himself as he really was. And thus the new militancy was a self-assertion as well as an assertion of the validity of the race. The Negro was in the process of telling himself and the world that he was worthy, had a rich culture, and could make contributions of value. And as Locke saw it, this new consciousness would be auspicious in two special ways. It made the New Negro the “advance-guard of the African peoples in their contact with the Twentieth Century civilization,” and it also provided “the sense of a mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem. . . .” He thus incorporated in his thinking the American sense of mission, a, strange variation on the “white man’s burden.” The New Negro’s task was to discover and define his culture and his contribution to what had been thought a white civilization. In Locke’s words, the Negro “now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization.” Thus, the considerable talents of the Negro could be released from the “arid fields of controversy and debate to the productive fields of creative expression.” So it was to be through a cultural awakening that the Negro was to express himself. Locke could not promise that the race would win the long-desired end of material progress, but the enrichment of life through art and letters would be an ample achievement. What is more, the Negro would be a people rather than a problem. Echoing the words of Van Wyck Brooks, who ten years earlier had searched to find value in white American culture, Alain Locke announced the New Negro as the race’s “spiritual Coming of Age.” It was no mere coincidence that both Alain Locke and Van Wyck Brooks saw crisis in terms of cultural maturity. Americans have been consistently perplexed as to what culture is, what is distinctively American culture, and what of value America has contributed to Western civilization. Concern over the thinness of American culture forced many intellectuals to give continued backward glances to Europe. Sometimes the American’s consciousness of Europe was ridiculed, as in the probing satire of Mark Twain, sometimes it was marked by a fascination with its richness, sophistication, and corruption, as with Henry James. Always, it seemed culture was something alien to the fresh and rough American; always something learned, attained, achieved, never the natural gift of one’s soil, one’s land, One’s blood. Malcolm Cowley has made this point very well in Exile’s Return.5 In its early pages Cowley explains why a group of young intellectuals around World War I felt no sense of value in their own experience and past. AH of their education, as Cowley remembers, pointed them toward some other place than home. They were trained out of their regional dialects and into a colorless, school-learned Ameri-English which all of their teachers had dutifully acquired. The stuff of imagination, art, and literature was never pulled from the mysteries of their own country and the experiences of their own people. Rather, they were asked to dream of medieval European castles and English country life. It was as if the things that they could touch and see were unworthy of art and culture. Then, they were drawn to eastern colleges; fitting-rooms of culture, as Cowley remembers. Culture to the educated American had nothing to do with folk roots–one’s past or one’s life–rather, it was clothes that one could wear after a long process of divestment of the familial, the regional, the natural. Thus Cowley makes most understandable the feeling of uprootedness and alienation of the generation of young men who were in college, or had just finished college, around World War I. Set adrift from a past without meaning or value, or so their education had trained them to believe, they went searching for some roots in European civilization grafting themselves on to the only culture America had taught them to respect. If anything, this alienation was more accentuated among Negro intellectuals. There had been little in the public schools or the colleges to give them a sense of their cultural past or the distinctiveness of their people. The black boy or girl who went to mixed northern schools and to white colleges could have expected little. But even the segregated southern schools provided little of their own past besides the names of heroines and heroes: Harriet Tubman, Sojoumer Truth, Frederick Douglass, and of course Booker T. Washington. The fact that the line back to the past was snarled where enslavement and migration from Africa had begun made the racial past hazy, distant, and impossible to know. But even the more recent history of the Afro-American, that which could be touched and measured, seemed to provide little of the stuff for race-building. A society weaned on selfreliance and individual freedom could find little to honor in servitude, no matter how enforced. The shame that black men felt about their past was a measure of how much they had drunk up the values of the white American world around them. So they were left with the few names that had survived of the men and women who had defied oppression, achieved success in white men’s terms, and who stood thus as proof that the past would not enslave blacks forever. Shame of the past made the Negro reject much of the reality of his people’s condition. In the mad rush from slavery, inferiority, and oppression into citizenship and manhood, much was garbled and confused. Those things reminiscent of the former condition—unskilled and field labor, enthusiastic religion-were to be denied. The professions (medicine, dentistry, law, the ministry, teaching, and undertaking) and business were to be embraced. One was to join the more sober Protestant denominations. It was not simply a matter of achievement or social mobility, these attainments were bench-marks measuring the distance a black man or woman had traveled from his past of chains. They were symbols which connoted to the Negro freedom and manhood. And they were not just in a few men’s minds; they were built into those institutions, most of all the schools, charged with the impress of social values. Of course, white schools transmitted “American culture,” an ethnic cultural blandness—America was made up of many different peoples, but they were all the same. When the black child was well treated in such schools—not made to feel shame for his blackness—he was taught that he was like everyone else; a truth that his experience surely belied. And while Negro schools had many virtues in teaching the child that he had worth, they taught him also that he should be like white men, not like himself, and surely not like his father. It did not matter whether the teacher followed W. E. B. DuBois’s philosophy of the “talented tenth” or Booker T. Washington’s even more condescending notion that the Negro should prove himself acceptable as a citizen in white men’s terms. The point is not that teachers and schools were misguided or pernicious. White and black teachers gave many a young Negro his first feeling of genuine, personal worth. Rather, despite their best intended efforts they could not give to the black child a rich, dense, and mysterious sense of a past like that of traditional cultures. It was not merely that the ingredients were difficult to pull out of the American Negro’s history, and that the sophistication and beauty of African cultures were not yet understood, but that the experience of American institutions worked against it. The object of American public schools was to make their charges American; which meant a rounding off of points of difference. Oriental and Jewish children were able to retain the gift of their past through special schools. But Negro children were swept into the cultural blender with other Americans, pulled into the vortex of Anglo-Saxon norms. Having no known culture to deny, the Negro was doubly damned. For when he discovered the emptiness and soulessness of the bland amalgam, or when he saw that the ultimate truth of the lie was that you had to be white, he had no place to return to. Adrift, his “shadow, so to speak, was more real to him than his personality.” Like white children, black children were taught that the speech of their fathers was not proper English speech. They were encouraged to leave behind their dialects and regional and ethnic idioms. The tales that they had heard the old folks tell were not the stuff of culture; they would read Jane Austen and Thackeray and dream of English romance. Nor were the special rhythms of their speech suitable for poetry when Keats and Shelley were the models. In time, they could learn to accept the spirituals, with their decorum and simple majesty, but never the more spirited gospel songs and surely not the profane blues. Culture was something distant and alien— generally English—to be studied, and, as Cowley remembers, fitted on like a suit of clothes. Negroes in provincial communities were introduced into Western culture by their churches. Vocal ensembles toured these towns, as well as soloists like Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson. Church members would sell tickets to a performance which would include the standard tour repertory with some spirituals. Local talent would be given a chance to perform, and there was always an elocutionist who would read from classical English literature. One would not have been surprised to find Browning Societies here and there in black communities. Of course, the experience of the people had been there all along. The folk wisdom that had sustained Afro-Americans through their most devastating trials persisted. The music in the language, the distinctive folk imagery, the drama of religion, the essential delight in music remained. In a very vital and real way, that folk culture and tradition was undergoing the genuine alchemy of art. Work songs, gospels, and hollers were being transformed into blues, ragtime, and jazz. But, strangely, although black intellectuals were quick to acknowledge the contribution of black music to America culture—the only distinctive Amer can contribution as it was often put—they were rarely willing to claim it was serious music of high culture. And while many Harlem intellectuals enjoyed the music of the cabarets, none were prepared to give someone like Jelly Roll Morton the serious attention he deserved. Jazz was infectious entertainment and not an ingredient of high civilization. So, provincialism pulled the black intellectual—like his white American brother—away from the culture of his experience into the culture of his learning. Since culture was not something that could be taken for granted, the announcement of its attainment by both white and black Americans seemed natural enough. The vogue of the New Negro, then, had all of the character of a public relations promotion. The Negro had to be “sold” to the public in terms they could understand. Not the least important target in the campaign was the Negro himself; he had to be convinced of his worth. It is important to understand this, because much of the art and letters that was the substance on which the New Negro was built and which made up the socalled Harlem Renaissance was serving this promotional end. Understanding this gives added meaning to the prose and poetry that were produced, and helps us appreciate their problems as art. Alain Locke and the others were correct in saying that there was a New Negro: an artistic self-consciousness of the Negro’s human and cultural worth, the sense of an urgent need for self-assertion and militancy, and the belief in a culturally enriched past in America and Africa; these themes were real enough in the works of Negroes of talent. It was not merely Locke’s imagination, although like an anxious parent he nurtured every suspicion of talent as if it were the bloom of genius. If the American context forced it to be artificial and contrived, it should not be thought Alain Locke’s fault. There is, however, a problem which promotions such as Van Wyck Brooks’s New American and Alain Locke’s New Negro share. It is in the metaphor itself. For whatever promise the new man has for the future, his name and the necessity for his creation imply some inadequacy in the past. Like the New Year’s resolution or the “turning over a new leaf,” the debut of the New Negro announced a dissatisfaction with the Old Negro. And since the New/Old dichotomy is a mere convenience of mind—AfroAmericans were really the same people all along—the so-called Old Negro was merely carried within the bosom of the New as a kind of self-doubt, perhaps self-hate. How can one take up the promotion of race (or nationality) through art without exposing this doubt? How can one say that Negroes are worthy and civilized and new men without at the same time acknowledging doubt and denial? Even the best of the poems of the Harlem Renaissance carried the burden of self-consciousness of oppression and black limitation. Langston Hughes had just been graduated from high school in Cleveland and was on a strange journey to his father in To-luca, Mexico. His mother had made him feel guilty for wanting to go to college rather than to work, where he would be “of some use to her.” While Hughes saw in his father a means of doing what he wanted—to go to college—he was perplexed because his father’s bitterness had made him contemptuous of Negroes and a terrible man to live with. Hughes was on the train, crossing the Mississippi River at sunset, when he wrote a poem on an envelope that has since been most often printed as characteristic of his work.6 The Negro Speaks of Rivers I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Hughes’s use of the Mississippi here is traditional and symbolic. The river is an important symbol not only because it connotes the religious division between the temporal and eternal life, but because it is relentless, persistent, and timeless. It is eternity itself, with no beginning and no end. It pulls into itself the soil around it, and it sustains the life at its reaches. It is profound and enigmatic; its depths are somber and mysterious. And the rivers that Hughes mentions add to this point. The Euphrates, then thought the cradle of men, and the other three rivers are not only mother waters, sustaining life around them, but they have known the black man and the black slave. And Hughes says the black man has watched and known these rivers through the centuries, learned their inevitability, and, through them, sensed eternity. The black man, therefore, will persist because his soul has become one with the streams of life. Hughes has managed in this poem to capture some of the force of the spiritual. Like many spirituals, it is so simple and clear a statement that it is difficult to argue the truth of the assertion. As in many spirituals, the Negro is the speaker and identifies himself with eternal forces, transcending the facts of life and the very conditions which make the statement necessary. And like many spirituals, there is great pathos in its promise of ultimate justice (the Negro’s value is ultimate, indeed, eternal), because no other justice is possible (or likely). Another poem of Langston Hughes’s shows something more of his pathos. Dream Variation 7 To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me— That is my dream! To fling my arms wide In the face of the sun, Dance! whirl! whirl! Till the quick day is done Rest at pale evening. . . . A tall, slim tree. . . . Night coming tenderly Black like me. Each stanza, here, is a variation on the same dream; but what is most striking in this poem is Hughes’s contrast of day and night—black and white. The poet, again the Negro, identifies himself with the night; doubtless white men and the white world are the day and the sun. The white day is frenetic, harsh, and hot, while the night is cool, gentle, and tender. But what is this dance that the poet wants to do? Is it one of joy, defiance, or abandon? One senses a kind of suicidal defiance, because the “place of the sun” (suggesting simple freedom) becomes “in the face of the sun” (suggesting defiance). Arms wide, body whirling and spinning, is this not in spite of the white-hot materialistic civilization? But the statement seems a death wish. The Negro is like the night, and the night is death. For the speaker, from the “quick” day, comes to rest here, with a coolness about him and a monumental “tall, slim tree” over him. The night that he welcomes is gentle, pale, and tender like the sleep of death. Here, too, Hughes’s poem touches one of the major themes of the spiritual. Whatever the anxiety and torment of life, death is always a guaranteed release. As in so many of the spirituals, death in Hughes’s poem is a welcome friend. And here, too, Hughes has joined the Negro to eternity and eternal forces through the simple association of the Negro with night and death, the untroubled, the tender and peaceful sleep. The white day passes, the sun sets, but the soft night, like the river, is eternal. Like the spirituals, both of these poems gain power from the promise of a transcendent peace. Beyond the hardship and oppression of this life, there is an eternity and meaning which the poet claims to be his. The spirituals, unlike the poems, rest upon a metaphysic which insists that the “least of these” will be redeemed. It was not a racial matter; it was for all men. Negroes in religious expression found this message especially suited to their condition. When devout black men and women sang these songs, there was more than the self-pity of a lowly people claiming eternity for themselves. There was the sound of the triumph that Christianity promised, the glimpse of the eternity itself. So, while the spirituals were a racial expression, they were a universal message for all the dispossessed. Hughes’s poems, on the other hand, are clearly racial. His poem is not merely speaking to the condition of everyman—that humbleness which Christianity promises to reward—but the condition of the Negro as a Negro. The pathos of his assertion is clear enough. But without the metaphysical or Christian justification, the claim to eternity and to ultimate worth lacks triumph and power. It is not that one denies the Negro’s soul is deep or that justice to him is deserved and ultimate, but the secular expression lacks an important dimension. One need not ask a religious man why he feels it necessary to seek transcendent and eternal meaning for himself. But when a poet justifies his people in these terms, one suspects in him the initial doubt. There is doubt in the poet’s mind, or he assumes doubt in his audience. Otherwise, he would not have to write about the matter in this way. Ironically, the literature that was to be advanced as evidence of the Negro as a new man contained a strong odor of this pathos and self-doubt. It tainted all the pronouncements and exposed the vulnerability of the New Negro concept. Nowhere is this theme more clear than in one of Countee Cullen’s poems: Yet Do I Marvel 8 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 some day 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! It may be argued that Cullen, influenced as he was by the English Romantics, was indulging in the self-pity that often captured those poets in their lesser expressions of inner anguish. There is something to this; Cullen turned to Tantalus and Sisyphus—mythological figures who fed the Romantic imagination—to give measure and equivalence to his torment. Yet, his torture is not personal, nor is it generic. It is racial, somehow the peculiar torment of black men who are sensitive and wish to sing. And Countee Cullen assumes that his audience, white and black, will know and immediately understand that there is a special godly and tragic condition here. But how can one know that? And why should everyone know that the black poet’s trial is especially futile? Is it because he is wounded and limited? It could not be that he alone has more soul than voice to sing; that was the predicament of all poets, the Romantic would say. One cannot be sure what Cullen had in mind when he thought his reader would know the special curse of the black bard, but close to the surface is doubt which is not merely self-doubt but race doubt. Because it is a racial doubt and limitation rather than personal, the reader senses the pity of the futile effort, without the heroism of the tragic condition.9 Such doubt and presumption of limitation were inextricably a part of the New Negro vogue. Just as Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming of Age was condescending about American art and culture, assuming it limited and wanting, those promoting the New Negro, even as they proclaimed the Negro’s worth, provided evidence that they had to assert and prove it. Part of the assertion of the Negro’s value was the assumption of militancy. The assertion that justice ultimately would be his was not enough for the New Negro. Indeed, that had been the problem with the Old Negro, the docile and patient retainer who knew that his reward would be in heaven. Hughes and the young Negro writers of the 1920s were not saying that. The Negro had ultimate, eternal human worth. It should not only be asserted, but the Negro should assume in the present the posture promised him in eternity. He should be a man like other men. Thus, the other face of the New Negro’s persona was militant and selfassured. Indeed, the only way he was to claim his true manhood was to demand redress of grievances, to fight back. Some of the poetry and prose of the 1920s by Negroes iterated this theme. The most notable was a poem by Claude McKay. If We Must Die 10 If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men well face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! Here was none of the non-resistance that the Old Negro had preached, nor the tone of superiority and righteousness of pacifism. Black men must fight back. This was the message of East St. Louis, Illinois, and Houston, Texas. It was the same call to self-defense that the Messenger and W. A. Domingo had applauded. The poem, itself, as an expression of the new black spirit, alarmed conservative whites. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had it read into the Congressional Record as evidence of the unsettling currents among black Americans. In later years, when Arna Bontemps collected on a phonograph record an anthology of Negro poets, McKay claimed that it was not just a Negro poem. He said, following World War II, that he had never considered himself a Negro poet. He claimed that he had considered “If We Must Die” a universal poem, for all men who were “abused, outraged and murdered, whether they are minorities or nations, black or brown or yellow or white, Catholic or Protestant or Pagan, fighting against terror.” Yet, in the Messenger in 1919 and in Harlem Shadows in 1922 no one could doubt that the author was a black man and the “we” of the poem black people too.11 The search for a personality for the New Negro necessitated the rediscovery of a heritage. As much as the young Negro intellectuals wanted to proclaim a new day and to inter all vestiges of the old image, they felt a need to find justification in the past. The heritage was to serve the new image. So, much effort went into the explication of the Negro’s folk traditions in America and into the interpretation of whatever was known of the civilizations of Africa. The Negroes’ importance to American culture, it was argued, was that he provided its only genuine folk tradition. From the Afro-Americans had come a rich and complex folklore and music which was the most distinctively American contribution to world culture. While the Negro had been denied by both whites and sophisticated blacks, he was unconsciously pouring out, in his own entertainment and for his own soul’s needs, the raw folk materials upon which any American music or literature would have to rest. With this argument in mind, Negroes began to recover their folk traditions. Sophisticated Negroes began to find value in the peasant character of the mass of American Negroes. After all, it was from the common man and the peasant stock that these ingenuous and fresh folk materials were being produced.12 Arthur Huff Fauset was a teacher in the Philadelphia public schools, but he turned his attention to the collection and study of folklore. In 1925 he took a trip gathering materials in the lower South. He had earlier done research in Nova Scotia under the auspices of the American Folklore Society. He turned his attention to Negro materials not only because of his racial attachments but because of his fear that the rapidly changing and urbanizing South would soon obliterate this very rich source of the Negro’s past. Fauset was convinced that much that was distinctively Negro character was to be found in his folk materials. At the same time, he recognized that the main themes of folktales were intercultural. American Negro folkthemes could be recognized in European and Oriental, as well as African legend. So the compiling of the materials of the southern Negro would both give America some cultural richness and texture and relate it to the vast and complex world literature. Arthur Fauset thought of folklore as documentary. Folktales should not be tainted with the personality of the recorder. Fauset had found this the signal fault of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus tales. Harris had created in Uncle Remus a character who was artificial to the folk materials that were reported through his words. Through his created character, Harris had intruded and corrupted the folktales. Harris presented his view of the antebellum southern Negro. The reader had to take Harris’ sentiment in order to get to the starkly unsentimental folktales themselves. Fauset, on the other hand, conceived his role as the gatherer and recorder of folktales just as they were spoken by the narrator, without any intrusion whatsoever. The value was in the tale itself, not in sophisticated or sentimental interpretation. Zora Neale Hurston had more formal training than Arthur Fauset but was far less pure in her handling of folk materials. Orphaned at an early age, Zora Hurston had a very difficult time lifting herself from her poor Jacksonville, Florida, environment and getting a formal education. But she was strong-willed, aggressive, and tenacious; she managed through hard work, and the benevolence of white friends, to get into Howard University, finish at Barnard College, and take an advanced degree in anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia University. Poverty and limitation had merely given her a keen instinct for opportunity and a single-minded will to grasp it when it came. In New York, she seemed constantly under the tutelage and patronage of white women; she was more comfortable under these arrangements than many of her Negro contemporaries.13 Negro folk materials were merely another opportunity for Zora Hurston, and she made the best of it. Gifted with a clear, uncluttered style and a keen ear for voice sounds and rhythms, she capitalized on her academic training, research, and the new public interest in Negro folk materials. She went beyond simple collection and used the common, rural Negro—his speech, manner, and superstitions—as the stuff for numerous short stories and plays. She was prolific, and her stories appeared in Opportunity and other magazines. Her talent for transcribing common speech brought her version of the rural Negro to the eyes of those who were trying to define the New Negro by contrasting him with his common folk. Zora Hurston’s imagination was the stuff of her stories. She provided the plot and voiced it with the speech of the lowly, rural Negro as her ear had captured it. She colored it with his superstitions and habits of mind. She did not give the reader full, well-developed characters. Rather they were types, folk types. So, these tales became Zora Hurston’s general assessment of common Negro character and life. He was robust and passionate. He lived for the instant but was keenly aware of a world beyond. His life and his mind were uncomplicated; good and evil, strength and weakness, were not fuzzed by ambiguity. Yet, he lived in the constant presence of ghosts and supernatural powers—both good and evil. But this was Zora Hurston’s interpretation, and Arthur Fauset could complain as much about the sentimentality and artificiality here as in Joel Harris’ work. Harris, at least, had told authentic folktales, while the line between Zora Hurston’s mind and her material was never clear. Authentic or not, the popularity of folk materials among the promoters of the New Negro marks a significant step in the Negro intellectual’s gaining self-consciousness and self-confidence. Remarkably, this Afro-American concern with the preservation of folk materials was paralleled by a similar white effort which began to discover value in mountain and rural folkidiom. The American’s willingness, white and black, to parade before the world his peasant origins was tantamount to stating his own sophistication and urbanity. One seems to have come of age when one can discuss with detachment and pride one’s true origins. In much the same way, the concurrent promotion of spirituals by black intellectuals was a sign of confidence in their urbanity. Of course, the Negro spirituals had long since been “discovered.” It was 1871 when the Fisk Jubilee Singers brought these songs to the attention of American white audiences. In the years that followed, several Negro colleges sent ensembles on tour throughout the United States and to the major cities of Europe. By the beginning of the twentieth century, whatever the white world knew of Afro-American expression came through these songs. But it was not the white world alone that had to make this “discovery.” Like much that had been associated with slavery, the spirituals were lost in the sophisticated Negro’s rush to cast off the garb of servility and simplicity. The spirituals, like a rustic relative, were an embarrassment to some. But no Negro could claim dignity for himself and his race while denigrating so essential and distinctive a part of his people. W. E. B. DuBois saw this. In Souls of Black Folk, he wrote a chapter about these “sorrow songs,” in which he ascribed to them a mystical force which bound the race emotionally. They were the voice of the common experience, essential to the soul of black people. After all, he, a black Yankee whose entire life rjad been devoid of the experience from which these songs were produced, could instinctively sense, and be one with, the emotions—the torment and labor—that had given them birth. DuBois told his black readers that the spirituals were so essentially them that their search for identity was futile until they found themselves in this emotional seedbed that was the race’s common spirit. The early years of the new century saw a growing literature on the Negro spiritual. By the end of World War I, a remarkable number of Negroes had turned their attention to these songs. They included, of course, performers like Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson, whose popularity was as much a measure of white as Negro interest. More notable were men like Harry T. Burleigh, James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson, Nathaniel Dett, and Hall Johnson who began collecting and scoring these songs. A part of their motivation was similar to that which compelled Arthur Fauset to collect and record folktales: this rich and fundamental part of the Negro’s life and history would be lost as the Old Negro was transformed into the New. And the promoters of the New Negro found more meaning in the spirituals than just the emotional and imaginative record of the Negro’s past. Alain Locke saw those songs as a direct route to a rich and virtually untapped vein of folk art, the Negro’s entire musical expression. Indeed, taking American culture as a whole, nothing so distinctive and so usable was available to the white American artist. Locke saw the spirituals, blues, and jazz as the stuff from which the American musicians would have to build their classical music. They would be the germ of modern music. He knew this would be, because he already had heard the soul sounds of Negroes in the music of new European composers: Milhaud, Dvořák, Stravinsky. It was only for Americans, white and black, to discover their souls in this true American folk music; then the American could truly come of cultural age.14 The discovery that Negro folk materials were usable in art was applicable beyond the realm of music. James Weldon Johnson had contributed to the gathering of the spirituals in the collection that he and his brother edited and arranged in 1925–26, and in 1927 he experimented with Negro folk idiom in poetry. His poems collected in God’s Trombones were a fresh, distinctive effort. They took the rhetoric, idiom, and images of the Negro preacher and used them as poetic materials. Johnson had written dialect verse in earlier years, but these were different in two important ways. The subjects were serious, and the reader never forgets their serious intent; simple statement, and simple and direct figure, only add to their emotive force. And while the poet added syllables so as to “set that sun ablazing . . .” and used ungrammatical expressions: “An he didn’t hear no sound,” these effects are euphonic and rhythmical and not the character of the poems as in dialect verse. “Creation” is Johnson’s version of a Negro preacher’s conceptualization of Genesis. “Go down Death” reduces orthodox Christian eschatology to human experience and imagination: death is the welcome friend and deliverer. Through these poems, Johnson tried to capture, for art, a basic Negro folk expression, the sermon. Other Negro poets used everyday speech and the imagination of the black common man as suitable materials for poetry. Langston Hughes conceived of poetry as the music of the common people’s language, captured and tied to the images of their minds. He saw himself and his poems as the means through which ordinary Negro men and women could become poets. And, perhaps, he could be the means for others to see their own beauty, see themselves as artists. Many of his early poems were efforts to touch the dignity of the common man’s life. “Mother to Son” in Weary Blues, and “Song for a Dark Girl” in Fine Clothes to the Jew, are clearly such efforts. But during this period, Hughes also made an attempt to transpose the blues into poetic form. Sometimes as in “Weary Blues,” the poems borrow blues rhythms and incorporate entire blues phrases for emphasis and definition. In other poems, such as “Homesick Blues,” Hughes seems merely to have transposed a blues lyric into a poem. It all added to Langston Hughes’s insistent theme that Negro art would be achieved through capturing the common black man’s experience in art forms. Sterling Brown also chose the common man as the subject and source of his poetry. Brown’s poems, however, were fed by the strong stream of American common-man mythology. His is backcountry tradition—the selfstyled hero, with the bragging tone of the river boatman. He is Whitmanesque. “Odyssey of Big Boy” claims manly experience across the broad land and makes his persona one with Casey Jones, Stagolee, and John Henry himself. The Negro intellectuals were attempting to build a race and define a culture. If there was validity in the notion of distinctive racial cultural contribution, it must be in the special experience of the race itself. So the whole people and the whole Afro-American experience had to be searched and exploited for clues to heritage. Folk materials and the expression of the common man had to be the essence of such a tradition. But heritage also demanded a continuity in the past, the transit of culture. When the promoters of the New Negro looked back to find his origins, or when they tried to discuss racial culture, they were always thrown back upon Africa. Africa was an essential enigma in this culture-building enterprise. It was not only impossible for twentieth-century Afro-Americans to pick up any unsevered threads back to Africa, but it was difficult to find correspondence between the cultures of Africa and that of the American Negro. Alain Locke, who was quite knowledgeable about African art, was quick to admit this. The African had a strong tradition of graphic and sculptural expression, but the American Negro, true to an ascetic Puritan tradition, had little visual art to show. The untutored Afro-American could sense no more in a piece of African sculpture than could a European. There was an ocean and an age of experience between the black men of the two continents. Yet, Alain Locke was convinced that African art held a key to Afro-American artistic expression.15 African art was a legacy; its existence made evident the fact that black men were the craftsmen of a disciplined and classical art. So, the American Negro need not think himself “a cultural foundling without his own inheritance.” He could be freed from imitativeness and indebtedness to the white Western culture. Thus, the knowledge of African arts should encourage American Negroes to pursue long-neglected lines: painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. Using his inheritance as a base, the American Negro, Locke dreamed, might then create new idioms from that tradition. With the African tradition to inspire him, the Afro-American could become the subject of art as well as the artist. He would be freed from the white dogma of beauty. Locke observed that European artists had already been rejuvenated at the African fountain. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque found in African sculpture the insight which led them into cubism. And sculptors like Constantin Brancusi and Wil-helm Lembruck were liberated through African sculpture to powerful restatements of human form. If they can, why can’t we? Locke asked. Once known “and appreciated, this art can scarcely have less influence upon the blood descendants, bound to it by a sense of direct kinship, than upon those who inherit by tradition only, and through channels of an exotic curiosity and interest.” Alain Locke did not need to wonder long. Negro painters and sculptors began experimenting with the African motifs. Richmond Barthé sculpted several figures which exhibited strong African influence. Aaron Douglas was more consistently devoted to the African legacy than Barthe. Douglas developed a style of drawing which employed stark black silhouette. The figures were always angular and stylized. Like African graphics, Douglas’ drawings were more decorative than representational; they were stark blocks of design. In the 1930s Douglas developed this technique into a series of large murals, using flat colors. They were elaborations on his early work; Africa and the exotic dominated. It was easier to use the African artistic tradition as a means of giving racial quality to art than it was to discuss the significance of Africa to the Negro. Alain Locke had found it difficult and was reduced to a simple assertion of faith in a valuable African legacy. Other Negro intellectuals were equally perplexed by the African heritage. All seemed to know, or sense, that Africa should mean something to the race; there should be some race memory that tied black men together; ambiguity and doubt always left the question unresolved, however. Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage” did little more than show that poet’s quandary. For he raised the question throughout the poem, what is Africa to me? It is a long poem, with unrelenting tetrameter and a regular aa, bb, cc, rhyme setting up a rythmic beat that echoes Vachel Lindsay’s “Congo.” And although the question recurs, and the poet tells of Africa’s enchantment, he never convinces the reader that the question is an honest one. Africa comes through as romantic and exotic, no more or no less real for him as a black poet than it would have been for a white one.16 All day long and all night through One thing only I must do Quench my pride and cool my blood, Lest I perish in their flood, Lest a hidden ember set Timber that I thought was wet Burning like the dryest flax, Melting like the merest wax, Lest the grave restore its dead. Stubborn heart and rebel head. Have you not yet realized You and I are civilized? So I lie and all day long Want no sound except the song Sung by wild barbaric birds Goading massive jungle herds, Juggernauts of flesh that pass Trampling tall defiant grass Where young forest lovers lie Plighting troth beneath the sky. Doubtless, Africa was a large question for the black intellectual searching for identity and heritage. It was compelling because of the rootlessness and placelessness of the Afro-American and his search for the springs of a race’s origins. It was not answered by the romantic ejaculations that Cullen used for passion. Langston Hughes came to the question more honestly in Afro-American Fragment17 So long, So far away Is Africa Not even memories alive Save those that history books create, Save those that songs Beat back into the blood– Beat out of blood with words sad-sung In strange un-Negro tongue– So long, So far away Is Africa. Subdued and time-lost Are the drums—and yet Through some vast mist of race There comes this song I do not understand, This song of atavistic land, Of bitter yearnings lost Without a place— So long, So far away Is Africa’s Dark face. America and Americans were provincials. That was the problem. Black men as well as white men were forced through condition and education to look elsewhere for the springs of civilization and culture. Afro-Americans could not submit to the judgment that Europe was their cultural parent. Such an idea jarred reason, and relegated non-whites to aboriginal and primitive origins which denied them civilization. Whatever self-denial white Americans indulged in to tie themselves to Europe was intensified among blacks, whose road back to Africa was unclear; and when they looked they saw only a dark continent. It was dark because little was known about it; its civilizations and its people had not been high in the order of importance for European scholars. So, black men yearned, as American provincials, to find meaning and identity in Africa; their frustration was a measure of their Americanization. World War I had been a kind of puberty rite for peoples the world over. Self-determination, an aim of the Allies in the war, became a slogan in the 1920s. Black intellectuals saw in the Yugoslavs, Czechs, and Irish a clue for their own emancipation and uplift. They, too, were a people to be defined. The New Negro was a product of this era of race-building. Afro-Americans were to reforge the long-severed links between the world’s black peoples. From this effort would come a revitalized black culture and self-esteem. Whatever else, the era produced a phenomenal race consciousness and race assertion, as well as unprecedented numbers of poems, stories, and works of art by black people. Harlem was making it all happen, because black men were coming together there, some intending to build a cultural capital of the black world. So, Harlem intellectuals looking at themselves, thought of the renaissance.