Art The Black Identity - Harlem Renaissance PDF

4 Art: The Black Identity It has been the fate of all Americans to struggle to accommodate the individual and his particular ethos to the broad general American culture. Black men and white men, immigrant and native, have been subject to crises of identity because the American Dream promises to incl...

4 Art: The Black Identity It has been the fate of all Americans to struggle to accommodate the individual and his particular ethos to the broad general American culture. Black men and white men, immigrant and native, have been subject to crises of identity because the American Dream promises to include them all in a common culture which has not been realized. The problem is paradoxical. For the tradition of America is change, and the singular characteristic of its culture is vague indefiniteness. For the individual to define himself in terms of American experience has been therefore problematic. Identity could no more be taken for granted than could culture itself. The immigrant and his children tried to belong to the adopted culture: learn the language, drop old ways, adopt new styles and mannerisms. But, in time, the adopted mannerisms, life styles, language, and materialism became feeble substitutes for genuine culture. And third and fourth generations of immigrant families attempt to rediscover an ethnic tradition. The native American and his children have been no more secure. Constantly dislocated in the flux of an ever-changing society, they have tried to translate the uncertainties of newness into what has been understood as traditional. Foreign or native, one sooner or later would find comfort in ethnic identification. Negroes, too, were to discover, after the decades of struggle following emancipation, that the America they wanted to get into was a spiritual “nowhere.” They began the search for their own selves. The quest was intensified because of the general postwar uncertainties, because American intellectuals generally were displeased with the manifestations of American culture, and were themselves in search—in Paris and elsewhere—for themselves. It was a hard, perplexing task for Negroes. Unlike the immigrant, the Negro as a native American did not have ready at hand the surface manifestations of a former culture which, no matter how diluted and distorted, could serve as a link with the past. Nor could the Negro easily imagine a place where his history began. The Italian or the Greek or Serb could know of a village or a place to which he could return (to visit) where his family would still be remembered, where, indeed, his family still lived. His imagination could work himself back into the community, the tough and austere life, and even the oppression of gentry, or Turks, or Cossacks. And while he reconstructed it, he could congratulate himself on the distance that he had placed between himself and that past. Steel, railroads, coal, business, cities, were the present stuff of his life, not the grudging and churlish hills of his homeland. Being American for many immigrants meant being a part of progress and the future, with a strong and real sense of a different past. Negroes, on the other hand, had no such clear sense of the past; it was a general and abstract thing, slavery. Those whose past was northern were like the other undifferentiated city dwellers without the possibility of having “first family” identification—they were Yankees and native sons without the attendant self-satisfaction. And those from the South could seldom, even if they wanted to, find the plantation, the farm, the cabin of their origin; except for a rare few, family could seldom be traced beyond two generations. The Negro’s search for self was closer to that of the deracinated young postwar intellectuals that Malcolm Cowley describes in Exile’s Return than to that of the immigrants. Both the Negroes and the uprooted youth were cut off from a past to which they could not return, and with which they could not identify. At the same time, they were both unrelated to American progress in amassing wealth, building machines, and producing things—the one because he was repulsed by the Philistine, the other because racism denied to him the American Dream. Both were American—having no other past—and thus were subject to greater hopes, expectations, bitterness, and despair than were the immigrants. There is a very real and important difference between being alien and alienated: being a stranger to something which is your becoming, or being native to something of which you are not a part. The task of Negro intellectuals, as they have addressed themselves to the issue of race in American life, has been to delineate Negro character and personality in the American context. Did the Negro belong? Was he distinctive? How? Was he merely a white man with black skin? The problem was to define the Negro as a part of the American future; few were willing to touch the American past. The general picture that one gets of the Negro through the eyes of his intellectual interpreters is that of the man rejected, the citizen denied. The American Dream held out the promise to all men: through industry, selfreliance, and individual talent the limitless vista of progress were theirs. Most black men wanted to say that this promise of American life was theirs —logically, rightfully, morally—as much as it was other men’s. The issue is not, as many interpreters insist, a matter of assimilation—segregation vs. integration.1 These matters were incidental. Faced with the past of slavery and a present of racism, could the Negro become a part of an American future that honored its own precepts? Justice John Harlan, dissenting from the “separate-but–equal” doctrine which was proclaimed in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), might well have said that the American Dream, rather than the Constitution, was color-blind— the future, progress, hope, color-blind. For that was the issue for black men. A great deal rested on whether one affirmed or denied that the American Dream included black men. A yes answer had to mean, at least ultimately, the end of formal segregation and legal discrimination. This was not merely because “separate but equal” is necessarily a fiction, nor simply because Negroes wanted to reject their blackness and become white. It was rather that segregation and discrimination ignored the individual, contradicted self-reliance, denied the promise. If, on the other hand, one answered no, that the Dream was for white men only, there was nothing to do but escape. But even when one looks at those who have said no and dropped out—the colonizers of Liberia, Garvey’s supporters, the Black Muslims—the Dream persisted in their very efforts.2 It does not matter that, in practice, the American Dream has been imperfect or even fanciful. It was a myth deeply believed by American people of all conditions, people who would call reality a lie before they would deny the future. But due to the real social, economic, and political discrimination, those Negroes who were yea-sayers to the Dream had to explain continually the disparity between black Americans and others in their progress, their achievement. Implicit in discriminatory practice was the doubt that black men could really compete individually; hence the justification for bars to competition. Despite the circularity of the logic, barriers which limited Negroes’ mobility were defended because of the observable inequality of Negroes and whites, which, of course, the barriers guaranteed. Indeed, the majority opinion in Plessy vs. Ferguson is a classical example of this circular argument. So, black believers in America’s capacity to absorb Negroes, and in the black man’s potential, bore the onus of race while they promoted individualism. They had to explain the whole race in order to gain advantage for anyone. The emphasis was on achievement. Every instance of advancement—a successful business, a new professional, a patriotic act or service-became ammunition in the barrage against arbitrary barriers. On the other hand, every failure, every crime, every black man’s foolishness became a spot of shame that had to be rubbed away. Every act of a Negro that came to public attention had emotive connotations far beyond the significance of the act itself. The Negro intellectual, the leader, was imageconscious. It is within this context that the Harlem leadership’s hysterical reaction to Marcus Garvey must be understood. He appeared a fool, impractical, a charlatan; and as his movement foundered in financial and legal straits, it became essential to black intellectuals that the public know the difference between a showman and the real thing. But it is also within this context of image-consciousness that one must understand the promotion of Negro artists, poets, and novelists during this decade. But what is really remarkable is that these black yea-sayers, in their struggle to uphold the American virtues of progressivism, individualism, and selfreliance, were obliged by circumstances to be group-conscious and collective. The American Dream of open-ended possibility for the individual was for them another paradox. The Negroes’ history, out of slavery and beyond emancipation, threw this paradox into sharp focus for those black spokesmen who straddled the decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du-Bois illustrate this point. Despite all of their apparent differences—in spirit, tone, and self-image—these two men were in remarkable agreement on essentials. In Up From Slavery and Souls of Black Folk these authors agree that the race is downtrodden, and both project the progressive bias of uplift in their imagined solutions. Both men were one with the bed-rock virtues of America—frugality, industry, temperance, competition. Washington’s autobiography has a strange identity with Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth, and DuBois’s own achievement, he stressed, was the result of intense individualistic competition. The differences, of course, are significant. Du-Bois wrote his book to make “the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth”; Washington dared not so to presume. Both, however, were men of their time and place, progressive Americans—mired in the collectivity of race. They both believed in the ultimate justice of an economic system in which the laws of efficiency and quality automatically discriminated among men. Washington believed in it so uncritically that he was prepared to sacrifice his contemporary Negroes’ expectation of dignity and citizenship to the inevitability of that justice. Present-day efforts to find in Washington the roots of modern black nationalism should take into account that he never lost faith that the Negroes’ future was within the American context. Nor did he assume a segregated future, for racial antipathy would decline when economic necessity warranted it and when the economic disparity between the races diminished. Washington, indeed, was honored among whites (probably more than among blacks) because he allowed himself to be seen as the black evidence that the Dream was real. The challenge to find a black identity within the American cultural context was made more difficult because the stereotype which defined Negroes for most Americans was the obverse of the Protestant Ethic, that convenient measure of deserving character. Laziness, slovenliness, and excessive sensual appetite deserved no reward except poverty and dishonor. Furthermore, the range of black character that whites would accept was extremely circumscribed, if one judges by those who appear in print. The Negro was pathetic or humorous, loyal or treacherous, servile or savage. Thus, it was a delicate problem for the black writer who wanted to develop Negro character. For he had to delineate—to an audience with such bias and which judged character, growth, and change by progressive and materialistic measures—a man who was honorable and sympathetic but nevertheless constrained within the limits of actual Negro experience. And until World War I, any such literary effort would have to conform to the “trinity” of genteel dogma: a focus on morality and uplift, a faith in a progress conveniently linked to morality, and the aspiration of a learned (not native) culture.3 Nor could the black hero be aggressively critical of the order of things, North or South. The critics and the publishing establishment were anxious to bind up the wounds from the Civil War and to eradicate lingering bitterness between northern and southern whites.4 It was a tight and narrow place for a black hero to breath. The model of such a hero can be found in Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom. He has become a much maligned old man, his name synonomous with fear, obsequiousness, and servility—surely not heroic characteristics. To an age that knows Uncle Tom’s Cabin mainly through commentary, it is probably nearly impossible to think that Uncle Tom is in any way heroic. Yet that was Mrs. Stowe’s intention, reasonable if one accepts that era’s values and assumptions. Uncle Tom’s guiding virtue is an unquestioned faith in God and loyalty, principally to his first owners. This obligation is based on an honestly reciprocal affection, which Tom feels bound to even to the point of obedience to a new master and overseer after circumstances force his sale. Tom has the sense of honor to serve his loved master even beyond the grave. But his character saves him from mere servility when he refuses, under the threat of death, to flog a slave for Simon Legree. Tom, indeed, has virtues which appealed to nineteenth-century Americans—industry, temperance (moderation), selfless loyalty to others (not servility), and a strong sense of duty to a moral order. While grievously cramped and confined within the oppressive institution, while tested by the inhumanity of a vicious overseer, Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom can remain patient and human despite all. He is noble and heroic precisely because he refuses to do mean and low things—in contrast to the whites who enslave him; he will not allow his essential self to be corrupted by passion and the conditions of life. He is a powerful indictment of the institution of slavery all the more, not because he rebels against it, but because he overcomes it through that essential inner humanity—through character. And what a moving example of life that was to people who nursed at the nipples of Puritan duty and transcendental immanence.5 The Negro writer was moved to project the image of the black man who, contrary to the stereotype, suffered under the unfair and arbitrary problems and restraints that beset him. The protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) finds the difficulties of realizing his musical talent as a Negro insurmountable. Becoming ashamed of the impotence of the American blacks (after witnessing a lynching), he decides to become white. Johnson was careful to keep his apparently white protagonist’s action from being dishonest, or deceitful. Everyone had always taken him for whatever he acted; he merely chooses to no longer act Negro. Honor is always central in his thinking: I argued that to forsake one’s race to better one’s condition was no less worthy an action than to forsake one’s country for the same purpose. I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a moustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead.6 Coming to this resolve, the young man drops his professional interest in music and becomes devoted to the business world. And he succeeds like any Horatio Alger hero, working hard and watching for opportunities to make wise investments. His most crucial trial of honor comes when he falls in love with a white lady and must decide to tell her, risking her love and, perhaps, all that he has achieved. Of course, he does the honorable thing, he reveals his secret, and true to genteel formula, love ultimately triumphs. The wife dies, after bearing two children, and the protagonist is left with some ambivalence and mild guilt. His children and their futures justify, for him, his continued life as a white man, yet he has lingering doubts about the greater self he might have been had he continued with his music to define the genius of his black people. Johnson wanted his readers to understand that being white was not a desideratum of Negroes; circumstances and bitter frustration forced subterfuge. The tragedy, as he saw it, was not merely the protagonist’s abdication of his art (and his essential self) but, more, that the society had lost the cultural synthesis that might have been possible through the genius of this marginal man. And, further, the message is clear that civilization, virtue, honor, gentility, and success were qualities of individuals, not races.7 A year earlier than the publication of Autobiography, that other black man of letters, W. E. B. DuBois, published his first effort in prose fiction, The Quest for the Golden Fleece (1911). The central purpose of the novel was to show the influence of impersonal and distant forces in controlling personal destiny. DuBois used cotton and its far-flung, international power as the force that frustrated the human aspirations of little people—poor white farmers as well as his main black characters, Zora and Bles. The novel thus parallels Frank Norris’ The Octopus and The Pit, not only in its use of a commodity as the symbol of impersonal force (Norris used wheat) but in its naturalistic determinism as well. It should be recalled that Norris’ and DuBois’s novels came at either end of that agrarian Populist upheaval which had stressed the individuals’ impotence under the oppression of industry and finance. This helps to explain their similar preoccupations. Zora and Bles begin their story as innocents who are one with the life and the nature that blesses them. Their struggle with King Cotton’s empire, however, forces on them a sobriety and sophistication which is at once tragic and hopeful. Zora is a clear link with slavery and the past. She is very dark, exuberant, and “savage” as the novel opens. As a child, she had been forced by her mother, a slave, to gratify the lust of her former master. And, like a slave, Zora felt little compunction about lying or stealing. But with the help of Bles and a Yankee school-mistress, Zora becomes a respectable heroine—respecting education and purposeful industry. Of course, DuBois was only a man of his times in knowing that a true heroine could not be morally compromised.8 Zora’s and Bles’s final resolve to fight the system with black share-cropper cooperatives, as well as the book’s suggestion that white-black, poor farmer alliance was the ultimate solution, are suggestive of Populism. In any event, DuBois had tried to thrust his black characters into the mainstream of American moral and political values. Whatever their historical limitations, the Negroes’ character, virtue, and education were the future’s hope to destroy artificial barriers. Jessie Fauset tried to project the Negro image in very conventional terms. Indeed, it was her intended purpose in writing novels to place the Negro in the context of standard American life. Her first novel, There Is Confusion (1924), will sufficiently illustrate how she used the cliches of genteel realism to construct stories of the “respectable” Negro middle class. Joanna Marshall comes from such a family; her father is a typical American businessman, despite the fact that the source of his middle-class comfort is a catering business. The novel turns around a very erratic and temperamental romance between Joanna and Peter Bye, a young man whose genealogy is entangled in main-line Philadelphia Quaker stock (thus the title). Joanna is much enamored of her father and his success, and she has a compulsive ambition to “amount to something,” which almost destroys her romance with Peter. Peter is very bitter about his ancestry; the black Byes produced the wealth that the white Byes enjoy, yet they are not even acknowledged as part of the family. His bitterness would have destroyed him except that Joanna goads him on, using her love and promised marriage as inducement. But Joanna, too, is ambitious for herself and finds it hard to commit herself wholly to Peter. Hoping to make himself worthy of Joanna, Peter puts away personal indifference and takes up the study of medicine, but in time Joanna’s games cause him to break off with her completely and to drop out of medical school too. All to Joanna’s grief; she learns through his rejection how much she really loves him. Jessie Fauset’s strong class bias is evident in her treatment of Joanna’s friend, Maggie Ellersley, who helps run her mother’s boarding house. Maggie falls in love with Joanna’s brother, Philip, and he loves her, although he is much too shy to let her know. Joanna becomes so enraged at Maggie’s social presumption that she writes her an ugly and hurtful letter. Maggie impulsively runs off to marry an older man, whom she later discovers to be a gambler. Maggie remains thus degraded until Peter, on the bounce from Joanna, rescues her. But even that ends as Peter makes up with Joanna and goes off to join the war in Europe. Miss Fauset resolved her conventional novel in a conventional way. Peter happens to meet Meriwether Bye (white) aboard the troop ship to France. He happens, also, to be present at Meriwether’s death on the battlefield. The pathos and the genuine humanity of Meriwether soften Peter’s heart, dissolving the last of his hatred and bitterness. Maggie and Philip are also reconciled in Europe—she, a social worker, he, a desperately ill soldier. They each learn for the first time that they had loved the other in their youth. And Maggie, true to the Victorian code for a woman with her past, devotes herself to his care and to a life of selfless service. Of course, Peter and Joanna are married on his return from the war; she is resigned to him. They soon have a child who promises to complete their lives. Ironically, the white Byes are without a male heir with the death of Meriwether, and the old family head comes to Dr. Peter Bye and offers to take his son to be reared into the legacy. Of course, Peter Bye says no, but Jessie Fauset sees the triumph in that he said it without bitterness. For, the truly genteel values of uplift, self-perfection, and honor burden all of Miss Fauset’s novels and give all of her approved Negro characters the image of conventional respectability. Of course, these works, as would be inevitable, had a purpose and function besides the purely artistic. They all tried to project the image of the Negro as exemplary within the context of conventional morality. Where those who peopled these stories achieved success, it was simple to understand as a matter of character overcoming the unusual obstacle of race. But the realities of life forced Negro writers to confront the frustration of black people. It was no easy task to handle that problem honestly within a conventional model which had strong stoical ingredients and which could not accommodate bitterness or anger at personal misfortune. Everyman was to bear his burden without self-pity and complaint. That was Uncle Tom’s heroism, and it could be seen—if viewed through the lense of tradition—as the beauty and triumph of the Negro. This image was utilized by Countee Cullen, among others, in poetry having a racial subject. Characteristically idealized, Cullen’s “Simon the Cyrenian Speaks” transforms the black man’s servility—through act of will and sensitivity to ultimate virtue—into a triumphant act. Simon the Cyrenian Speaks9 He never spoke a word to me And yet He called my name; He never gave a sign to me, And yet I knew and came. At first I said, “I will not bear His cross upon my back; He only seeks to place it there Because my skin is black.” But He was dying for a dream, And He was very meek, And in His eyes there shone a gleam Men journey far to seek. It was Himself my pity bought; I did for Christ alone What all of Rome could not have wrought With bruise of lash or stone. For Langston Hughes, on the other hand, this same theme, which transforms humiliating and frustrating labor into virtue, is more earthy and immediate. Mother to Son 10 Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor— Bare. But all the time I’se been a’ climbin’ on, And reachin’ landin’s And turnin’ corners, And sometimes goin’ in the dark Where there ain’t been no light. So, boy, don’t you turn back. Don’t you set down on the steps ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard. Don’t you fall now— For I’se still goin’, honey, I’se still climbin’, And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It is a very delicate problem for, as one can see in these poems, pride inevitably wrestles with pathos. Power and clarity of image suffer in the uncertainty. In his poetry, Claude McKay chose another way of conceptualizing the black man’s existence within oppression and frustration. The unfair restraints were a challenge to test the mettle of the unconquerable self. McKay showed the undaunted will triumphant against impersonal corruption. America 11 Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand. Here, too, one reads the late Victorian stoic mood; the bravado of tone is more than reminiscent of W. E. Henley: “I thank whatever gods may be/For my unconquerable soul.” McKay, here and in his other poems, is careful to avoid pathos and self-pity. But he also consciously struggles against projecting bitterness. As he says in “White House,” “Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate/Against the potent poison of your hate.” As in most of his poetry, written after his migration to the United States, McKay assumes the persona of the Victorian stoic activist—Henley, Housman, Kipling—alone against the ravages of external, impersonal forces. Although a selfstatement, McKay projected himself as exemplary, and therefore without violence to his intent one can understand this poetry as the idealization of the Negro against his oppression: a black Prometheus in the twentieth century. Yet image-making and image-conceptualizing were no easy things. For if the Negro were really no different from other men, if he were a white man with black skin, so to speak, if the objective differences were solely environmental and not matters of character, then there would be nothing but the biology of color which set him off from whites. There would really be nothing that he could claim as distinctive, except for history and immediate condition. The future which unfolded itself in inevitable progress would ultimately obliterate distinctions, even these superficial differences would disappear and all would be as one. No matter how much one wanted to claim that discrimination against Negroes was arbitrary and that the society ought to be color-blind, since there were no differences among people, still one felt the need to hold onto some claim of distinctive Negro character. Abandoning all distinction was a total rejection of the past, a kind of selfobliteration. Those qualities of American life which had germinated in black soil had to be explained. The spiritual, the music, the dance, the language, were distinct because they were from a Negro source. Without distinct Negro character, there could be no Negro genius. None of these writers would have denied the black man his special gift. W. E. B. DuBois was eloquent and moving in evoking the germ of that idea in Souls of Black Folk (1903), and James Weldon Johnson touched it too in “O Black and Unknown Bards.” The novels of both of these authors reflect the ambivalence that grows out of the effort to balance the conventional Protestant Ethic with the recognition and approval of a distinctive Negro spirit. DuBois, for instance, was unable to resolve the contradition of Zora’s and Bles’s initial innocence and the necessary sophistication of the cooperative economic venture which is their Hnal strategy against the civilized cotton machine. While he is fascinated with Zora’s primitivism— her wild, half-nude dances—he must bring her, through education and conventional virtue, to contend with her environment. Her primitivism and innocence had been corrupted by her institutionalized environment; the former master and the plantation—remnants of slavery—are translated into the cotton empire as the modern exploiter. Love, innocence, and purity of self will not sustain Zora; she must become educated and sophisticated— tough. While, doubtless, DuBois approves of this transformation—thinks it imperative—there is nonetheless a trace of regret over the lost black Eden. Johnson’s novel shares this regret. Descriptions of Negro life, whether in the New York cabaret or the southern rural revival meeting, are charged with the sense of distinctive spirit and color. Marshall’s (an actual Negro social club in pre-Harlem New York) is described with genuine affection. White entertainers who made a profession of blackface use the club to pick up their “authentic” black material. The novel also assumes that the protagonist’s quite remarkable musical talent is really ethnic. His special genius—being a marginal man between white and black—is that he is as fresh in his interpretation of ragtime as Chopin. His unrealized ambition— his calling, indeed—is to bring that distinctive black genius, which bursts naturally from the souls of ragtime musician or gospel singer, into a cultivated musical statement. When the protagonist decides to leave the world of race, he relegates his music to a hobby and concentrates his energies on real estate, investment, and money-making. Thus, Johnson draws a line between the humane, artistic spirit of black Americans as against the hard materialism of whites. The tone of regret that ends this narrative reiterates the lost hope—the Negro soul denied. Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930) confronted this dilemma head-on—unfortunately, as Hughes himself confessed, without real success. Sandy, the little boy around whom the novel revolves, lives in the tension between the flight and abandon of music and laughter and the sober duty of achievement. Each member of his family presents a different face to the problem. Aunt Hager, his grandmother, is sober and religious. She has raised three daughters by taking in washing, and now helps with Sandy. Of the daughters, Tempy, with great self-discipline and energy, devotes herself to getting ahead and accumulating property. Harriet, the youngest, is hurt, and angered by racial injustice, and has become pleasureseeking and blindly rebellious. Annjee, Sandy’s mother, is married to Jimboy, an itinerant blues singer and guitarist, who comes and goes like a spirit. Jimboy is the ultimate artist, a troubador whose music generates his life, for whom life and joy are united even in life’s sadness. It is his laughter and life-giving spirit that sustain Annjee despite his irresponsibility. Harriet’s humanity, too, is sustained by Jimboy, for it is his music and her dance and song that free her from the corroding bitterness that she holds within. For Tempy, joy and laughter are time-wasting. Pleasure and play are the Negro’s curse, according to Tempy, her husband, and their friends. Aunt Hager had great ambitions for her children, hoping that they would achieve something for the race. Annjee and Harriet have disappointed her, dropping out of school, so she has placed all of her hopes on Sandy: “I wants you to be a great man, son,” she often told him, sitting on the porch in the darkness, singing, dreaming, calling up the deep past, creating dreams within the child. “I wants you to be a great man.” But Aunt Hager was not simply a religious woman who abandoned joy.12 Her faith has been her joy. “Sandy remembered his grandmother whirling around in front of the altar at revival meetings in the midst of the other sisters, her face shining with light, arms outstretched as though all the cares of the world had been cast away.” Only Tempy fully rejects this Negro gift of joy and laughter, and she has become enslaved to utter materialism. Hughes wanted the reader to understand that Sandy had absorbed the uplift and the moral character of Aunt Hager while still being possessed by the spirit and beauty of the Negro genius. It was this combination that was the Negro’s hope, in so far as Sandy was the future. The conventional American ethic proved inadequate in several significant ways when it was applied to the Negro. In the first place it was racist. For the “Custodians of Culture,” 13 the Negro was not central. He was an aberration, a kind of Caliban in a demi-paradise. When the critics and commentators considered culture, they used Anglo-Saxon models; American literature and art in the prewar years were judged mainly in terms of English models. If white Americans were merely cousins to that English tradition, black Americans could only be curiosities. In the second place, conventional values were optimistic. While they might be heavily moralistic, and while one might find beauty in the persistently moral life without reward, the basic assumption was that progress was inevitable and, being the signature of God, tied to the moral life. Whatever Booker T. Washington’s faith, the twentieth century found this convention invalid for the Negro experience. Individual achievement aside—it was painfully small and often bought at a dear price—the Negro was experiencing greater violence against him, greater restrictions, greater oppression than before. Indeed, in the postwar years it seemed that racism was being formalized— as a fact of American life—rather than erased by the transforming force of inevitable moral law and principle. Progress, in fact, was a lie. With such an awareness, the poor-but–honest and the moral-but–oppressed Negro image not only became a bore, it became irrelevant. What the war and the postwar years seemed to prove, if nothing else, was that the American system had no place for blacks. What all of the restrictive legislation, the riots, the lynchings, the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan (North as well as South, urban as well as rural) proved was that for the black man the American Dream was fantasy. No matter how much the Negro might affirm it and aspire to it, the Dream itself seemed to say no. Indominable and awful reality made it impossible for black men to project themselves into some American future that they would want. If the remarkable popularity of the Garvey movement tells us nothing else, it attests to the willingness of thousands of Negroes to put their dimes and dollars into another dream. Decades later, a white American character in drama echoes this same dream-quest and the same frustration: in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Willy Loman badgers the spirit of Uncle Ben who had gone into the African jungle and come out a rich man. But even before the war, forces were at work among white American intellectuals to transform traditional values, at least superficially. Henry F. May has described the prewar “innocent rebellion” which opened the door for the rather spectacular cultural eruption of the 1920s. Young people had gleefully and casually combined their distortions of Dostoevsky and Freud with H. G. Wells’s demand (prediction) of rational social reorganization and Henri Bergson’s ejaculations about élan vital. Convention, order, formalism were suspect. The truth of life itself, as testified in experience, became the measure. As May explains it, the “Liberation was, in its own way, pragmatic: it believed with [William] James that ideas should be judged not by their conformity to any preconceived truth but by the quality of life they contained.” 14 This “rebellion” and “liberation” emphasized spontaneity, suspected that which was too rational and logical, criticized the harsh materialism of American life, and challenged conventional moral (especially sexual) standards. Henry May makes it clear that these “rebels” merely redefined traditional norms; they did not destroy them. They could become moralistic in their advocacy of free love or sexual experiment. They substituted an easy and naive optimism for a belief in progress. And while they were quick to abandon the conventional apotheosis of AngloSaxon culture, they were equally eager to accept authentic exotics: Italians in Greenwich Village and Negroes in Harlem. James Weldon Johnson shared their optimism about culture, believing that art and poetry would be the bridge between races in America.15 The war did much to destroy the optimism of these people no longer young. Yet those who had the greatest influence on Harlem intellectuals were precisely those who held fast to their prewar innocence: Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Carl Van Vech-ten, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay.16 So the postwar years found traditional values in disarray. A very articulate and sophisticated segment of the white society appeared ready to stand everything on its head. Where industry, frugality, temperance (including moderation and decorum) had been the touchstones, now exuberance, spontaneity, irresponsibility (to be crazy), and sexual freedom were the new norms. The Negro, who had long fought a white imposed stereotype found that those very traits which he had denied were now in vogue. One need merely rework the old minstrel model, and one had a new Negro image that both conformed to contemporary values and laid claim to a distinctive Negro self. It also provided, for those who read reality as a denial to the Negro of the American Dream, the illusion of a half-way house between resignation and rejection. As the decade of the 1920s came to a close, the new wave of Negro literature chose to unearth the grotesque and exotic in black men, to abandon genteel standards and the embarrassment over what had been accepted as Negro traits (the stereotype). Indeed, the new effort was to accept those traits rather than to deny them, to convert them into positive and appealing characteristics. With this reversal of values, one could sometimes treat the Negro as superior to white men. Nella Larsen, native to the Virgin Islands and of African-Danish ancestry, explored through her novels the uncompromising dilemma of the cultured-primitive Negro. Her characters seemed always to be pulled between the poles of refined civility and passion. In her best novel, Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane is overwhelmed by the ethnic war within her mulatto psyche. Helga moves from Naxos—a narrow, regimented, authoritarian southern Negro college—to Chicago, to bourgeois Harlem, and then to maternal relatives in Copenhagen. Cramped at first by the provincialism of Naxos, then by the provincialism of race, she is never able to find peaceful adjustment. At first Harlem is liberating. It has a more varied and open life than either Naxos or Chicago. And, at first, the unconfused blackness of Harlem is a welcome relief from the race specter in the South; it also frees her from the white-black tension of her mulatto consciousness. In Harlem, all one needs do is relax and be black, and yet that does not mean denying to oneself the finer things of living—civilized and cultural things. It is only a temporary pleasure, however, for Helga’s white consciousness makes her sense more keenly than other Negroes the narrow provincial character of Harlem. The freedom from selfconsciousness that it allows black people evaporates outside the geographical and spiritual limits of Harlem. In Copenhagen, Helga is warmly received by her Danish relatives. She becomes something of a phenomenon, dark and exotic. Here, too, she finds pleasure in the comforts and ease of life of upper-middle–class Danish society. And she is honored by a proposal of marriage to a highly regarded and handsome portrait painter. She is disturbed, however, not merely because Axel Olsen exposes, through his portrait of her, Helga’s sensual and primitive nature, but because she sees by this sudden insight the key to her acceptance by the painter as well as her Danish relatives. He senses a tiger, an animal within her which he wants to possess—to ravish and to be ravished—through marriage if necessary. Even her relatives and their friends are a bit breathless at the smell of the jungle, the savage, the primitive, that they sense to be this almost-white girl’s spirit. Helga knows that she cannot be free—an honest self—and be a lovely freak for cultivated Europeans. She begins to long again for Harlem, where she can be herself. Her return, she tells herself and everybody, is only to be a short visit, yet she knows that she will never go back to Copenhagen. Harlem! What a relief, to be able to leave pretense, to be free! But, now even more quickly, the narrowness of Harlem life (and Negro life) begins to stultify, and Helga begins to hate the black people around her, and hate that within her that seems always to frustrate her. She wants, at least, to accept —rather, to surrender to—the sensuality that she has always struggled against. She—submitting to her passion—offers herself to Dr. Anderson, the president of Naxos College who chances to be in New York, only to be rejected by this married and wholly proper man. Helga’s humiliation, shame, and self-hate drive her to submit to Reverend Green, a just-literate rural, southern preacher, who comforts her in her anguish. Helga tells herself that her marriage to Reverend Green, and her choice to live with him in the rural South, will give her a chance to do constructive and useful work. But this is a deception too, for she has surrendered more to her own sensuality than to him. She has rejected all pretense and has resigned to primal and uncluttered feelings. “And night came at the end of every day. Emotional, palpitating, amorous, all that was living in her sprang like rank weeds at the tingling thought of night, with a vitality so strong that it devoured all the shoots of reason.” Thus, Helga’s life ends in bed, semiinvalid from too frequent pregnancies and unattended deliveries, looking forward to death—the ultimate of all surrenders. Miss Larsen’s lesser novel, Passing (1929), also treats the schizophrenia which results from racial dualism. Two Negro women, friends from childhood, each light enough in color to be taken as white, choose different ways to direct their lives. Clare Kendry chooses to marry a white man (perversely a race bigot), while Irene Westover remains Negro, marrying a colored man who is to become a quite talented (but frustrated) physician. These different life-styles reflect different characters. Clare is adventuresome, risk-taking, exciting, and cosmopolitan. Irene, on the other hand, is safe, stolid, a bit frightened of adventure, and provincial. The choice to become white, while adventuresome and courageous on one level, turns out to be essentially sterile. The Bellews have no children, and Clare is drawn, as if by a magnet, to surreptitious trips into Harlem. The thrill of adventure, which partly motivated the “deception” in the first place, is kept alive by flirting with the risk of discovery. But her white life is sterile in another way. There is something essential to Negro life—the gaiety, the warmth—that she misses in her white world. Irene Redfield, on the other hand, has bought security and a family—including a child—at the price of adventure, daring, and risk. She is essentially conventional and conservative, which ultimately (and ironically) threatens her marriage. For her husband, cramped and confined by racial strictures in the United States, wants to take a chance of going to Brazil, where he might have the opportunity of opening new paths in medical practice. But that would mean physical danger and discomfort and, more frightening to his wife, an uncertain future. Her fears and lack of taste for adventure threaten to emasculate both her husband and her son. Clare’s secret trips to Harlem bring her close to Brian Red-field; both respond to the other’s thirst for adventure, risk, and desired freedom from the restraints of ordinary conventionality. And thus, a very real threat to Irene’s life is thrust upon her. Her hysteria moves her almost to expose Clare’s pretense. But Irene is even frightened of that, because Clare freed from her husband would be an even greater threat. Nella Larsen constructs a perfunctory and entirely unsatisfactory denouement. Clare’s husband who has had her followed by private detectives, bursts into a Harlem party, and in the confusion Clare falls through a window and is killed. Clare, in fact, was relieved that her lie was discovered by her husband; she was then free. But that freedom was a threat to Irene, and the author broadly hints that Irene pushed Clare through the window. In both novels, Miss Larsen moved away from the conventional genteel formula. There was something distinctive and attractive in Negro life, and it had nothing to do with Jessie Fauset’s respectability. Yet, she was not able to abandon herself to an uncritical acceptance of black primitivism. The Negro had a special warmth, gaiety, and immediacy. But Nella Larsen also saw Negro life as peculiarly strict and confining. Harlem was provincial; it was pleasing only so long as one could envelop oneself into its geographical and psychic districts. The cosmopolitan had to be aware of its restrictions. Negro life was conservative and sterile; it had to devour itself to preserve itself. Contradicting, therefore, the faddism of Negro freedom, Miss Larsen exposed the psychological narrowness of Negro life, its avoidance of experiment, chance-taking, and daring. While she toyed with the notion of the Negro’s basic sensuality, she could not let it overwhelm her credo. Perhaps, it was too difficult to project the female primitive to good advantage. And Miss Larsen, a nurse by profession, was too much of a realist to ignore the ugliness, pain, and deprivation which need result from a primitive life tamed only by the rhythm of one’s blood. It is this sharp dichotomy of realist and romantic, etched in both her novels, that makes them seem schizophrenic. No other Negro writer of the 1920s was more anxious to use primitive and atavistic motifs than the poet Countee Cullen. It is a bit ironic, because none of the Harlem writers was more formally schooled, none more genteel in inclination and taste, none indeed more prissy than Cullen. Educated at New York University, where he won the Witter Bynner poetry prize, and Harvard University, where he received his Master’s degree, Cullen had consciously trained himself to be a poet. Most of his work was of a lyrical character, occasionally on racial themes. His Ballad of a Brown Girl was thought by Lyman Kittridge to be the best lyric written by any contemporary American. Cullen was clearly nineteenth century, and English, in his conception of poetic art; his strongest influence was Keats. The only contemporary poet to influence his work was Amy Lowell, but Cullen never appropriated her “Imagism.” He always took it that poetry was truly one of the highest arts, that the poet’s task was to say beautiful things, and that poetry, like all art, had moral intent. This formula made for the bland and bloodless verse which was characteristic of much American poetry around the turn of the century. So it is a bit strange to read those poems where Cullen—never with the abandon of Vachel Lindsay—seemed to step out of character and proclaim some deep primitive impulse of blood which threatened to command his mind and body. Yet, according to Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen was the most uncritical of the black writers in his acceptance of Alain Locke’s instruction to turn to African and primitive origins as the source of new work. Cullen tried very hard to do that. In the rather long poem, “Heritage,” 17 the poet engaged himself in a soliloquy which turns around the rhetorical question, “What is Africa to me?” The question is first posed in a simple historical context by “One three centuries removed,” and the question is repeated with the implied answer that Africa is nothing to the poet. But this is selfdeception: So I lie, who 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. The thought that Africa is nothing comes from a willful denial, yet heritage is so primal that it will not be doomed by mind and will alone: 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. So I lie, whose fount of pride, Dear distress, and joy allied, Is my somber flesh and skin, With the dark blood dammed within Like great pulsing tides of wine That, I fear, must burst the fine Channels of the chafing net Where they surge and foam and fret. But the denial of Africa continues following an assertion that it is merely “A book one thumbs/Listlessly, till slumber comes”; there is a catalogue of “unremembered” sights and sounds-jungle images. But, again, the poet finds “no slight release” from a blood-knowledge that makes him writhe to the rhythm of the rain. The rain’s “primal measures drip/Through my body, crying, ‘Strip’!” The soliloquy finds resolution in the statement that this black poet has become converted to Christianity, but even here he draws back from full commitment. “Wishing He I served were black,/Thinking then it would not lack/Precedent of pain to guide it.” So the poet wanders between the primitive and the civilized, between the Christian and the pagan: Not yet has my heart or head In the least way realized They and I are civilized. In “Fruit of the Flower” 18 Cullen reiterates some of the same themes. This time the poet contrasts himself with a father, “With sober, steady ways,” and a “puritan” mother. Despite this the father’s eyes bespeak “some still sacred sin.” And, although, his mother longs for heaven, she is frightened of death. So the poet wonders Why should he deem it pure mischance A son of his is fain To do a naked tribal dance Each time he hears the rain? Why should she think it devil’s art That all my songs should be Of love and lovers, broken heart, And wild sweet agony? Who plants a seed begets a bud, Extract of that same root; Why marvel at the hectic blood That flushes this wild fruit? Of course, Countee Cullen was an orphan; the parents whom he knew most intimately were not of his “blood.” Here, Cullen seemed to be confounding heredity in the romantic and racial way that was characteristic of those who applauded the primitive natures that they ascribed to Negroes. Few of the notable Negro poets of the 1920s worked with the paganprimitive theme as much as Cullen (indeed, it appears in only a few of his poems). The older generation, men like James Weldon Johnson, never touched it. While Langston Hughes was prepared to celebrate the beauty, spontaneity, and creativity of black Americans, his poetry of this period was clearly in the American folk tradition. He never used “primitive” or African characteristics to explain American Negroes. And Claude McKay’s poetry is surprisingly devoid of these themes—surprising since his novels are not. Only “Harlem Dancer” comes close to approving atavism. And the sonnet “Africa” is simply a historical statement of that continent’s grandeur which is no longer: Cradle of Power! Yet all things were in vain! Honor and Glory, Arrogance and Fame! They went. The darkness swallowed thee again. Thou art the harlot, now thy time is done, Of all the mighty nations of the sun. And Cullen’s efforts were confused as well, because they were not merely attempts to explore the source of African nativity, the wellsprings of Negro spirit and identity. But for that poet, Africa and “paganism” were instruments in his personal rebellion against the Christian church. His religious skepticism was always voiced as stemming from race consciousness: “Lord, I fashion dark gods, too.” Cullen’s attitudes about Africa and primitivism are enigmatic because they are only tools of this deeper revolt. “The Shroud of Color,” which is free of primitivism, is a far more successful statement of his problem with Christianity than “Heritage.” And while the latter is probably the author’s best known work, the former is far the better poem for its clarity. Actually, even his struggle with faith was emblematic of a far deeper and more traumatic rebellion which his training in the genteel convention ill-equipped him to handle. Both as a person and a poet, Cullen tried to free himself of an unusually close relationship with his adoptive father, a minister. His personal rebellion was slight and genteel. Searching always—and futilely—for an adequate persona, Cullen toyed with the self-image of the pagan poet. Even so, his pretty diction never quite matched the desire: Where young forest lovers lie, Plighting troth beneath the sky. For several reasons, some very personal, Cullen added his to the black voices that were suggesting the essential Negro spirit was to be found in Africa, in the jungle, in the primitive. As one might imagine, the African influence was most immediately felt in the works of Negro painters and sculptors. Individual Negroes found a place for themselves, with great difficulty, in the plastic arts. Henry Tanner (1859–1937), for instance, after study under Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Benjamin Constant in the Academie Julian in Paris, became something of a master of the dying academic tradition. His contrived but disciplined treatments of the Holy Land won him some acclaim, and he became the “dean of American painters” in Paris. And Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) received notice for her sensitivity to human suffering in sculpture which reflected the hand of her master, Auguste Rodin. Typical of their contemporary Negro artists, Mrs. Fuller and Henry Tanner stayed well within the bounds of studied, conventional, and conservative European imagination. Beginning in the 1920s, however, and continuing into the 1930s, Negro painters and sculptors attempted to incorporate Africanism and primitive motifs in their work. Except for William Johnson, sometime winner of Harmon Foundation awards, and Jacob Lawrence, who worked in the 1940s, they were not themselves primitives in art. Rather, some black artists, like some writers, were taken with the possibilities of Africanisms (as they understood them) and thought something profound in the Negro’s life and spirit could be evoked by them. Richmond Barthe’s sculpture has covered a wide range of subjects, from the massive, heroic man-on-horseback representation of the Haitian General Dessalines to the simply representational head of Katharine Cornell. Beginning in the 1920s and extending into the next decade, Barthe’s treatment of Negro subjects was not merely ethnic but he emphasized the primitive. His Flute Boy, which won a Harmon award in 1928, is typical. A standing nude—lithe, lean, adolescent—suggests freedom and innocence. The figure is quite angular—thin arms, pointed elbows, too-thin fingers holding the flute to the boy’s lips. The hips are too small for the bony and upward-pointing shoulders. The figure’s face continues these upward angles with boned cheeks and almond, almost feline, slanted eyes. All conspires to give this Pan-like figure a weightlessness, to make him a creature of air rather than earth. Barthé continued to use these techniques to translate the primitive dance into sculpted form. African Dancer (1933) is a nude black girl. The slightest ornamentation at the hips accentuates the sensual and rolling movement of the dance. This figure has been caught as if in abandoned movement; the arms, legs, and head are poised, suggesting the controlled freedom of dance. The figure’s sensuality, which is asserted by the contracted abdomen and nubile breasts, is climaxed by the dancer’s upturned face, with closed eyes and slightly parted lips. A nude dancer, Feral Benga (1935), is a male counterpart to African Dancer and similarly expresses Barthe’s primitivism. Here Barthé’s figure in front view holds in his right hand a long curved machete arched over his head. The sword begins a line continuing with the right arm which moves through a muscular and lean body to the legs— tightly closed, tensed, bent at the knees, and resting on the balls of the feet —to form a graceful S. On another plane, the left arm, curved downward, balances the figure and reiterates the line of the sword. Framed in the arc formed by the sword and the figure’s arms is a small Negro head, eyes closed and face slightly contorted. Barthé exemplified this African influence in other ways. Blackberry Woman (1932) is something of a metaphor which relates the African to the Afro-American folk. One basket on her head, another hooked on her arm, this almost exotic figure hawks her wares through probable southern streets. In 1938, Barthé was commissioned to do marble reliefs for the Harlem River Houses in New York City. One of the panels, Dance, was a strange mixture which mimicked highly formalized Egyptian art, yet tried to depict the artist’s conception of the rather athletic contemporary dance. The result was curious, but its debt to Africanism was clear enough. Some artists did no more than include African objects in their works. Palmer Hayden, for instance, in his Fétiche et Fleurs, included in a still-life of western furnishings (a cigarette in an ashtray, table and chair, etc.), luxuriantly leafy plants, an African sculpture of a head, and a fabric (table cover) of distinctive African design. Charles Alston’s mural for the Harlem Hospital, Magic and Medicine, which was commissioned by the W. P. A. Federal Art Project in 1937, included a panel which depicted that artist’s conception of African magic. It has strong elemental and natural emphasis: animals, lightening, and the sun share the scene with dancing and conjuring Africans. Alston employed these obvious symbols—dancing, drums, fetishes, etc.—to embody the mural’s message: modern medicine is better than primitive magic. Nevertheless, the African panel was more effective— more romantic and magical—than those which depicted modern doctors in white smocks. The San Franciscan Sargent Johnson became a part of the Harlem scene through competition for Harmon Foundation awards: he made figures in terracotta, porcelain, and enameled wood. Johnson did heads of children, plain, simple, expressionless masks. These heads were strongly Negroid— full-lipped, broad-nosed. The eyes were large, open, and almond-shaped, and the heads were unadorned (except sometimes ha