The City of Refuge [New and Expanded Edition]

The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher

Rudolph Fisher, John McCluskey, John McCluskey, Jr.

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780826218124
• eBook ISBN: 9780826266583
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

One of the premier writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Rudolph Fisher wrote short stories depicting the multifaceted black urban experience that are still acclaimed today for their humor, grace, and objective view of Harlem life. Through his words, wrote the New York Times Book Review, "one feels, smells, and tastes his Harlem; its people come alive and one cares about them."

A definitive collection of Fisher's short stories, The City of Refuge offers vibrant tales that deal with the problems faced by newcomers to the city, ancestor figures who struggle to instill a sense of integrity in the young, problems of violence and vengeance, and tensions of caste and class. This anthology has now been expanded to include seven previously unpublished stories that take up such themes as marital infidelity and passing for black and also relate the further adventures of Jinx and Bubber, the comic duo who appeared in Fisher's two novels.

This new edition also includes two unpublished speeches and the popular article "The Caucasian Storms Harlem," describing the craze for black music and dance. John McCluskey's introduction has been updated to place the additional works within the context of Fisher's career while situating his oeuvre within the broader context of American writing during the twenties.

Fisher recognized the dramatic and comic power in African American folklore and music and frequented Harlem's many cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs, and at the core of his work is a strong regard for music as context and counterpoint. The City of Refuge now better captures the sounds of the city experience by presenting all of Fisher's known stories. It offers a portrait of Harlem unmatched in depth and range by Fisher's contemporaries or successors, celebrating, as Booklist noted, "the complexity of black urban life in its encounter with the dangers and delights of the city." This expanded edition adds new perspectives to that experience and will enhance Fisher's status for a new generation of readers.

II.

The New Land

HIGH YALLER

I

THE TIMEKEEPER’S venomous whistle killed the ball in its flight, halfway to the basket. There was a triumphant bedlam. From the walls of Manhattan Casino impatient multitudes swarmed onto the immense floor, congratulating, consoling, gibing; pouring endlessly from the surrounding terrace, like long restrained torrents at last transcending a dam; sweeping tumultuously in from all sides, till the dance floor sank beneath a sounding flood of dark-skinned people, submerged to its furthest corners save the distant platform that gave the orchestra refuge, like a raft. A sudden blare of music cut the uproar. The turbulence gradually ordered itself into dense, crawling currents, sluggish as jammed traffic, while the din of voices at length reluctantly surrendered to the rhythmic swish-swash of shuffling feet.

Looking down from a balcony on that dark mass of heads, close together as buckshot, Evelyn Brown wondered how they all managed to enjoy it. Why must they always follow a basketball game with a dance?—the one pleasurable enough, the other mob-torture, she knew.

“Game?” challenged MacLoed.

She couldn’t refuse her escort, of course. “If you are.”

They descended and struck out like swimmers in the sea. MacLoed surrounded her as closely as a lifesaver. She knew that he had to, but she hated it—this mere hugging to music, this acute consciousness of her partner’s body. The air was vile—hot, full of breath and choking perfume. You were forever avoiding, colliding, marking time on the same spot. So insulating was the crush that you might sway for several minutes near a familiar couple, even recognize their voices, yet catch only the merest glimpse of their vanishing faces.

Something of the sort was happening now. Evelyn heard someone say her name, and the mordant intonation with the succeeding painful snatch-phrases made her forget the physical unpleasantness of the moment.

“Evelyn Brown?—Hmph!—got yellow fever—I know better—color struck, I tell you—girls she goes around with—all lily whites—even the fellows—Mac today—pass for white anywhere—Jeff, Rickmond, Stanley Hall, all of ’em—You? Shoot! You don’t count—you’re crazy ’bout high yallers anyhow.”

The words were engulfed. Evelyn had not needed to look. Mayme Jackson’s voice was unmistakable.

The dance number ended on an unresolved, interrogative chord that set off an explosion of applause. Jay Martin, who had just been defending Evelyn against Mayme’s charge, spied the former’s fluff of fair hair through several intervening thicknesses of straight and straightened black, and, dragging Mayme by the arm, he made for the other couple.

“Now say what you said about Evelyn!” he dared Mayme, mock-maliciously, quite unaware that Evelyn already knew.

“Sweetest old thing in the world,” came Mayme’s tranquil purr.

“Rake in the chips,” gasped Jay. “Your pot.” He addressed Evelyn. “How about the next wrestle?”

There was a ready exchange of partners. The orchestra struck up an air from a popular Negro comedy: “Yaller Gal’s Gone Out o’ Style.” Soon the two couples were urged apart in increasingly divergent currents.

“Black sea,” commented Jay.

But Evelyn was thoughtful. “Jay?”

“Nobody else.”

“I heard what Mayme said.”

“You did? Aw, heck—don’t pay any attention to that kid. She’s a nut.”

“I’m not so sure she isn’t right, Jay.”

“Right? About what?”

“I’ve been thinking over my best friends. They’re practically all ‘passing’ fair. Anyone of them could pass—for a foreigner, anyway.”

“Me, for instance,” he grinned. “Prince Woogy-boogy of Abyssinia.”

“I’m afraid you prove the rule.”

He was serious. “Well, what of it?”

“Oh, I don’t mean I’ve done it intentionally. I never realized it till just now. But, just as Mayme says, it looks bad.”

“Hang what Mayme says. She’s kind o’ gone on yaller men, herself. See the way she melted into Mac’s shirtfront? Hung round his neck like a chest-protector. Didn’t drape herself over me that way.”

“Jay! You’re as bad as she is.”

“That’s what she said.”

“What do you mean?”

“Claims I fall only for pinks.”

“Oh. I didn’t mean that.”

“Neither did she. Point is, there aren’t any more dark girls. Skin bleach and rouge have wiped out the strain. The blacks have turned sealskin; the sealskins are high-brown, the high-browns are all yaller, and the yallers are pink. How’s a bird going to fall for what ain’t?”

They jazzed on a while in noisy silence. Evelyn’s tone was surprisingly bitter when at last she spoke again:

“I wish I looked like Mayme.” Astonished, Jay stared at her as she went on. “A washerwoman can make half a million dollars turning dark skins light. Why doesn’t someone learn how to turn light skins dark?”

And now, in addition to staring, he saw her: the averted blue eyes, the fine lips about to quiver, the delicate, high-bridged nose, the white cheeks, colorless save for the faintest touch, the incredible tawny, yellow-flecked, scintillant hair,—an almost crystalline creature, as odd in this dark company as a single sapphire in jet. He was quick to comprehend. “I know a corner—let’s sit out the rest,” he suggested.

When they achieved their place in a far end of the terrace, the orchestra was outdoing itself in the encore. One of its members sang through a megaphone in a smoky, half-talking voice:

Oh, Miss Pink, thought she knew her stuff,

But Miss High Brown has called her bluff.

When the encore ended, the dancers demanded yet another. The rasp of syncopation and the ceaseless stridor of soles mingled, rose about the two refugees, seeming to wall them in, so that presently they felt alone together.

“Jay, can you imagine what it’s like to be colored and look white?”

He tried to be trivial. “Very convenient at times, I should think”

“But oftener unbearable. That song—imagine—everyone looking at you—laughing at you. And Mayme Jackson—‘yellow fever’! Can I help it?—Jeff—Rickmond—Stanley Hall—yes, they’re light. But what can I do? I like the others. I’d be glad to go places with them. But they positively avoid me.”

“I don’t, Ev.”

‘No, you don’t, Jay.” But her bitterness recaptured her. “Oh, I’ve heard them talking: ‘There goes Evelyn Brown—queen of the lily-whites—nothing brown about her but her name’!” A swiftly matured determination rendered her suddenly so grim that it seemed, fragile as she was, something about her must break. “Jay, no one’s going to accuse me of jim-crowing again!”

“Shucks. What do you care as long as you don’t mean to?”

“I’m not only not going to mean to. I’m not going to. I’m going to see to it that I don’t.”

“What the deuce—by cutting your gang?”

“No. By cultivating the others.”

“Oh.”

“Jay—will you help me?”

“Help you? Sure. How?”

“Come to see me oftener.”

“Good night! Don’t you see enough of me at the office every day?”

“Come oftener. Take me places when you’re not too broke. Rush me!”

He grinned as he perceived her purpose. “Doggone good stunt!” he said slowly, with increasingly enthusiastic approval. “Blessed if I wouldn’t like to see you put it over, Ev. It’ll show Mayme something, anyhow.”

“It’ll show me something, too.”

“You? What?”

She was about to answer when a sharp, indecent epithet rent the wall of noise that had until then isolated them. Looking involuntarily up, Jay saw two youngsters, quarreling vituperatively. They were too close to be ignored, and, since dancing was at its height, no one else was about.

“Excuse me a second,” he said, rising before Evelyn could protest. The pair were but a few feet away. The evident aggressor was a hard-looking little black youth of indefinite age,—perhaps sixteen actual years, plus the accumulated bonus of worldly wisdom which New York pays its children. He grew worse, word by word. Approaching, Jay spoke sharply, in a low voice so that Evelyn might not hear:

“Cut out that gutter-talk, boy!”

“Aw, go to hell!”

Jay stopped, less amazed than aggravated. He knew his Harlem adolescent, but he was not quite sure what to do with it. Meanwhile he was being advised: “This is a horse-race, big boy. No jackasses allowed!”

He seized the lad firmly by the shoulder and said, “Son, if you don’t cover that garbage trap of yours—–” but the boy flung away and defied him in a phrase both loud and ugly. Thoroughly angered, Jay clapped one hand over the offending mouth and, catching the youngster around the waist with the other, forcibly propelled him through a tangle of empty, spindle-legged chairs to a place where two big policemen, one black and one red, were complacently watching the dancers. Here he released him with “Now—talk.”

The boy scowled with wrath and impotence. So outraged in the street, he would have found a stone to throw. Now only a retaliative speech was left him, and the nearness of the law attenuated even that:

“Aw ’ight! Showin’ off before ’at ole ’fay gal, huh? Aw ’ight, y’ pink-chaser. Ah’m goan put y’ both in.” And he sidled darkly off, pulling at his disadjusted collar.

Evelyn, out of earshot, followed it all with her eyes. “Mac wouldn’t have done that,” she mused as she saw Jay turn from the boy and start back toward her. “Mac would have pretended he didn’t hear.” And before Jay reached her, she had decided something: “I certainly like Jay Martin. He’s so—white.”

II

Over 134th Street’s sidewalks between Fifth and Lenox Avenues Jay Martin’s roller-skates had rattled and whirred in the days when that was the northern boundary of Negro Harlem. He had grown as the colony grew, and now he could just recall the time when his father, a pioneer preacher, had been forever warning him never to cross Lenox Avenue and never to go beyond 135th Street; a time when no Negroes lived on or near Seventh Avenue and when it would have been almost suicidal for one to appear unarmed on Irish Eighth.

School had been a succession of fist-fights with white boys who called him nigger, until, when he reached the upper grades, the colored boys began to outnumber the white; from that time until high school, pitched battles superseded individual contests, and he ran home bruised less often. His high school record had been good, and his father, anxious to make a physician of him, had sent him on to college. At the end of his third year, however, the looming draft menace, combined with the chance of a commission in the army, had urged him into a training camp at Des Moines.

He had gone to France as a lieutenant. When he returned, unharmed, he found his father fatally ill and his mother helpless. Further study out of the question, he had taken his opportunity with a Negro real estate firm, and for five years now he had been actively concerned in black Harlem’s extension, the spread whose beginnings his earlier years had witnessed.

About Evelyn, of course, there had been hypothesis:

“Looks mighty funny to me when a woman Jennie Brown’s color has a yaller-headed young one white as Evelyn.”

“Daddy was white, so I understan’.”

“Huh. An’ her mammy, too, mos’ likely. ’At’s de way dese rich white folks do. Comes a wile oat dey doan want, dey ups an’ give it to one de servants—to adopt.”

“Oh, I dunno. How come she couldn’t been married to some white man ’nuther? Dey’s plenty sich, right hyeh in Harlem.”

“Plenty whut? Plenty common law, maybe. You know d’ ain’ no se’f-respectin’ white man gonna—”

“Well, doan make no diff’nce. Cain’ none of us go but so fur back in our fam’ly hist’ry ’fo we stops. An’ doan nobody have t’ ask us why we ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. The Quest
• II. The New Land
• III. The Unpublished Stories
• Appendix
• Works of Rudolph Fisher