Remembering the Harlem Renaissance

Cary D. Wintz, Cary D. Wintz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136520075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This volume tracks the many surveys of black literature created during the Harlem Renaissance. Noted works by such authors as Sterling Brown, Benjamin Brawley, and Langston Hughes are covered. Retrospectives also appeared in the journal Phylon, and many of those also appear in this collection.

CHAPTER 1

The Awakening: A Memoir

ARNA BONTEMPS

The Harlem Renaissance, so called, was publicly recognized in March of 1924. Much that had gone before can now be seen as part of the Awakening, but still another year was to pass before those personally involved could make themselves believe that they were, or had been, a part of something memorable.

What made their decade memorable, of course, was not simply an influx of black migrants from the South and the West Indies in that post-World War I era, as some have concluded. If that had been true, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, who seemed more profoundly aware of the ferment than anyone else at the time, might better have remained in Chicago or gone to Detroit to put up his antennae. But an upsurge of Negro creativity, such as New York’s Harlem was beginning to detect, to produce, and to foster, required more than a single source. It demanded an array of factors, a favorable conjunction.

Nor can the Southern region, that vast everglade of black life and vitality, be credited too much or too directly for the impulse. Neither Countee Cullen nor Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer nor Claude McKay was born or raised there. Nor were the fiction writers or the second echelon of black poets its products in most cases. But there can be no doubt that there was a happening in black America in those days and that suddenly stars began to fall on a part of Manhattan that white residents had begun abandoning to black newcomers.

It would not be far-fetched to say that a poem by a ghetto boy, appearing in the DeWitt Clinton High School literary magazine in January 1921, was the first clear signal. The Magpie had discovered and opened its pages so cordially to young Countee Cullen that he had become its associate editor, as well as a frequent contributor, and the poem he offered in this issue was titled “I Have a Rendezvous with Life (with apologies to Alan Seeger).” Cullen was a senior at DeWitt when this was published and by then actually a more sophisticated poet than these lines indicated, but he was obliged to bow graciously when he detected the tenor of responses that greeted his verse. In fact, he decided to enter it in a contest for high school writers sponsored by a woman’s organization. Again the responses fairly took his breath. Here was a brown boy from the depths of black Harlem giving an affirmative answer to the melancholy acceptance of death by a disenchanted American expatriate fighting in a French regiment. The irony of Seeger’s being killed in action was no greater than the irony of Cullen’s optimism, everything considered, and the latter caught the attention of the daily newspapers, as the former had done earlier. People began quoting Cullen’s poem. Teachers read it to their classes. Ministers read it to fashionable congregations. Indeed, everybody except Countee Cullen himself seemed moved by the thought of a black boy, less than prepossessing in personal appearance perhaps, insisting that putting meaning into his life, such as it was, was more urgent than contemplating death.

Cullen’s brave, if boyish, proclamation was followed just six months later by the publication in The Crisis, the influential and widely read organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, of a free-verse poem, by another black youth, titled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Langston Hughes, its author, had graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio, a year earlier, and Hughes later indicated that “Rivers” had been written directly after that event. “Rendezvous” struck New York like a lonesome meteor, burned brightly for a short time, then faded. “Rivers” touched down more like twilight itself. That both were harbingers is now evident, and it is no surprise that when the literary and cultural Awakening won attention three years later, these two poets, though still unpublished in book form, were the new stars that caused the eyes of both black and white intellectuals to blink.

If “one clover and a bee/ and reverie” is all it takes to make a prairie, an observer with the second sight of an Emily Dickinson might similarly surmise that two such teen-agers as Countee and Langston could at least wake up a renaissance, given the time and the place.

The two had not known each other before they began to be noticed, but it is interesting that only a few blocks separated them during Hughes’s freshman year at Columbia University. In their personalities and backgrounds, as in their attitudes toward life, there was little to suggest the twin roles in which they were about to be cast.

It was well known around the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem—“Mother Salem,” as it was sometimes called—that the childless pastor and his wife had adopted Countee and given him their name and a home in the four-teen-room parsonage of the church when the boy was about eleven years old. Countee’s gratitude to his foster parents never ceased to be a part of his adult personality. His poetry reflected it, even when he became mildly critical of the elder Cullen’s fundamentalism. Not even sad or tragic themes deprived his lyrics of thankful overtones.

In contrast to the melancholy beginnings that brightened so abruptly for young Countee, dilemmas clouded Langston Hughes’s early years, dilemmas that became more and more difficult as he reached manhood. Blessed with charisma and an instinct for tolerance, he was thwarted by parents who could not bear each other. Loved jealously and possessively by each, his childhood and adolescence, which could otherwise have been enjoyed if not romanticized, were marred by shuttling between an unhappy father prospering in Mexico and an unhappy mother working as a waitress in Ohio. But out of the ordeal had come the pensive interludes in which he conceived “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” as well as another poem, shortly afterward, in which he wrote, “Caesar told me to keep his doorsteps clean. They lynch me today in Texas.”

Needless to say, it took longer for ripples from such poems, dropped like pebbles in a sullen pond, to reach the outer edges of black consciousness than for those registered by “I Have a Rendezvous with Life,” but this did not yet matter. What mattered was that between the astonished attention drawn to Cullen and Hughes by early writings in 1921 and the occasion at which both were presented (one in absentia) to a cross section of literary opinion in New York in the spring of 1924, other things occurred.

I have the chronology in order because 1921 was the year when, half-hidden near the back of a large freshman English class at a small college in northern California, I peeped over the shoulder of the student in front of me and saw an approving smile on the face of the teacher as he read a paper I had submitted in response to the current assignment. I was more embarrassed than flattered by the attention it drew, but the teacher’s smile lingered, and I came to regard that expression as the semaphore that flagged me toward New York City three years later.

Meanwhile, Shuffle Along, an all-black musical comedy, became a smash on Broadway at about the same time Cullen and Hughes were making their initial bows. A happier conjunction could scarcely have been imagined, and the impact of this production, the wide popularity of its songs, the dazzling talent of its performers almost lifted the boy poets off their feet. Both began composing lyrics such as “Shake your brown feet, Liza,/ shake ‘em Liza chile,” or “To do a naked tribal dance/ each time he hears the rain.” Both became stagestruck at this tenderly impressionable time, and neither ever completely recovered. They met and made friends of actors, and many of the musicians, composers, and dancers in the company.

The exuberant music of Shuffle Along, including songs such as “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” “Love Will Find a Way,” and “In Honeysuckle Time,” is thought of with more than nostalgia, however, when one remembers the seething American cities torn by race riots in the post-World-War-I years in which it was produced.

Spared these racial convulsions, New York became a locus for what I would regard as a more exciting and perhaps more telling assault on oppression than the dreary blood-in-the-streets strategy of preceding years. Shuffle Along was an announcement, an overture to an era of hope. It was running triumphantly near Columbus Circle when Marcus Garvey, in a completely different mood, called an international convention of his Universal Negro Improvement Association to meet in Harlem in August 1921.

Short, squat, beaming with visions, regally attired, the visitor from Jamaica, in a spellbinding West Indian cadence, gave voice to dreams that literally blew the minds of a large segment of his impoverished generation of black humanity in the New World. In all seriousness he “declared” the republic of Africa and designated himself provisional president, while visitors from the West Indies, Africa, Europe, Central America, and Canada jammed Liberty Hall, as his large barnlike building in Harlem was called, and listened with a kind of awe. It had taken him five years to bring this moment about, but the audacity of his effort and this demonstration of power to captivate astonished and almost stunned many intellectuals. Nothing quite comparable had ever occurred before in the New World experience of black people.

If one were looking seriously for a contretemps in New York sufficient to ignite the incandescence of the ensuing years in Harlem, perhaps it could be found somewhere between these events. Both Cullen and Hughes were aroused by the two happenings, but apparently with different results. Happy in his new home and pleased with the personal attention he had received thus far, Cullen determined to make his last semester at DeWitt Clinton his best. Langston Hughes, on the other hand, still troubled by dilemmas, decided at this time to drop out of Columbia University.

The three years which followed, one can now see, were crucial to the careers of each as well as to the afflatus of the Harlem twenties, but neither poet was conspicuous during this interlude. Cullen wrote nothing as arresting as “I Have a Rendezvous with Life,” and Hughes sent to The Crisis nothing comparable to “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” While these two were temporarily out of sight, however, other relevant events occurred, other poets appeared.

The following year (1922) marked the publication by Harcourt, Brace & Company of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows. This was the first time in about a decade (since Dodd, Mead’s publication of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s posthumous Complete Poems) that a major American publisher had brought out a collection of poems by a Negro. It was the first time in nearly two decades that any such publisher had ventured to offer a book of poems by a living black poet.

I remember it well. I had been a summer school student at UCLA and picked up a copy of the McKay poems in the main public library on the way home. I had not seen a review or heard any mention of the book, but the first sentence of the Introduction made any such announcement unnecessary. “These poems have a special interest for all the races of man,” it said, “because they are sung by a pure blooded Negro.” Naturally I had to borrow the book that very minute, read it on the yellow Pacific Electric streetcar that day and a second time that night, then begin telling everybody I knew about it.

The responses of black friends were surprising. Nearly all of them stopped to listen. There was no doubt that their blood came to a boil when they heard “If We Must Die.” “Harlem Dancer” brought worldly-wise looks from their eyes. McKay’s poems of longing for his home island melted them visibly, and I think these responses told me something about black people and poetry that remains true. Certainly it was in my consciousness when I headed for New York two years later.

The year of Harlem Shadows, as it happened, was also the year that Jelly Roll Morton was playing in Los Angeles at a public dancehall on North Main Street and then, following the midnight closing hour, bringing his group to Leak’s Lake on what is now Imperial Highway but was then Linnwood Road, just beyond the city limits and not covered by the closing ordinance. I saw this arrangement from close up because my cousin, with whom I often stayed when home from college, played with the band at Leak’s Lake, and I would go with him and listen closely to the haunting music throughout the night.

I made no immediate association between this provocative new sound and the cadences of Garvey’s dream or Claude McKay’s nostalgia for his West Indian homeland and the kinship he felt for the blacks he met in Harlem. That was to come later when jazz began to gain respectable acceptance in the so-called temples of entertainment. It had not happened then.

Near that time, possibly in the same year, Garvey came to Los Angeles, still refulgent with éclat from his pontifical declaration of the republic of Africa and the amazed attention it had earned him. I went with my trumpet-playing cousin to Trinity Auditorium in midtown Los Angeles to hear him. He looked just as he had been described and pictured, but I was not prepared for his oddly lyrical style. The audience swayed and was transported. So I was not surprised when it was rumored a few days later that among the believers he had made on this visit was one of the foremost Baptist preachers in the city, whose church was on Naomi Street near Twelfth, the church which certain friends of ours attended, including the father of the boy who was soon to become my brother-in-law. This minister promptly dropped his charge and joined the Garvey entourage. The harvest was ripe, I heard another believer say, and the pudgy spellbinder had come with his sickle to reap.

For my own part, and I think this was the attitude of my associates, I never took Garvey literally. His bleating voice, calling to the “beloved and scattered millions,” was to me a far-off poetry, like the lyrics of some spirituals—“Bright Sparkles in a Church Yard,” for example, or “Walk in Jerusalem Just Like John,” or “I Looked Over Jordan and What Did I See,/ a Band of Angels Coming After Me,” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Conjunctions such as these, one might say, began to make a clearer pattern in 1923. In January of that year a young veteran of World War I became the editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, the expanded organ of the National Urban League. He was Charles S. Johnson, who had won his spurs in the riot-torn Chicago branch of that orga...