Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance

Cary D. Wintz, Cary D. Wintz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781135606411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

First Published in 1996. One of the most interesting features of the Harlem Renaissance was the degree to which black writers and poets were involved in promoting and analyzing their own literary movement. One of its formative events was the 1926 attempt by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes and other young writers to publish a literary magazine, FIRE!! This was the first of several efforts by black writers to establish literary journals. While these efforts failed, the magazine Opportunity employed a series of black poets as columnists to analyze and review black literary efforts. This volume collects the writings of this important literary journal as well as including many autobiographical and historical sketches.

Opportunity August, 1926

THE growth of Negro literary groups throughout the country and their manifest concern about the activities of other writers prompts the introduction this month of a column carrying informal literary intelligence. It begins under the hand of Gwendolyn Bennett, one of the most versatile and accomplished of our younger group of writers. The title for her column, The Ebony Flute, is an exceptionally engaging one and she is in position to provide interest in plenty for those who enjoy the lighter side of Negro letters. Miss Bennett is a poet and a teacher of art at Howard University. She has recently returned from a year's-study in Paris on a scholarship provided by the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Several of her poems have been carried in OPPORTUNITY, and her Song will appear in the new edition of The New Negro.

The Ebony Flute

By GWENDOLYN BENNETT

IN searching about for a heading that would make a fit label for literary chit-chat and artistic what-not I stumbled upon "The Ebony Flute." So lovely a name it is that I should like to have made it myself, but I didn't. I say "stumbled" advisedly. Reading again William Rose Benet's poem, Harlem, in the October Theatre Arts Magazine I was struck by the exceeding great beauty of his use of the "ebony flute" as an instrument upon which one could "sing Harlem." An ebony flute ought to be very effective for most any sort of singing for that matter. Ebony, black and of exquisite smoothness. . . . And a flute has that double quality of tone, low and sweet or high and shrill, that would make of Harlem or any other place a very human song. No better instrument then for the slim melody of what book one has read or who is writing what new play than an ebony flute . . . speaking of Benet's Harlem, what a lovely thing it is! It opens with:

I want to sing Harlem on an ebony flute
While trap-drums ruffle to a crash and blare,
With a clear note
From a sylvan throat
Of a clarinet—of a clarinet!
God and brute, black god and brute
Grinning, brooding in the murk air,
Moons of flame and suns of jet,
Hurricane joy and dumb despair.
Vermillion, black and peacock blue,
Pink, plum-purple, zig-zag green—
I want to sing Harlem with a paint-box too,
Shaking out color like a tambourine,
Want a red
Like a furious fire;
Want a black
Like midnight mire;
Want a gold
Like golden wire!
Want a silver
Like Heaven entire
And God a-playing at his own front door
On a slide trombone with a conical bore!

And on through line on line of beauty that coins a Harlem as a poet would see it, lush and colorful . . . fertile like rich earth. On and on to its close which ends with the crooning of his "Mammy Earth. . ."

O child of the wild, of the womb of the night,
Rest, and dream, my dark delight!

Tropic Death, a book of short stories by Eric Walrond will come out in October. Boni and Liveright are the publishers. I can scarcely wait for this book to be on the market. . . . Few of the Negro writers that are being heralded on all sides today can begin to create the color that fairly rolls itself from Mr. Walrond's facile pen. Tropic Death ought to have that ripe color that is usually the essence of Mr. Walrond's writing . . . and also a simple forcefulness that the author often achieves. . . . A new magazine is added to the Chicago list of Negro publications: American Life Magazine, Moses Jordan editing . . . the same Mr. Jordan whose book, The Meat Man, was published a few years back. The June issue, Volume One— Number One, carried "From Venice to Vienna" by Jessie Redmon Fauset and "Pale Lady" by Langston Hughes. I have not seen the July issue of this magazine but look forward to seeing the future copies that will come out. . . . Maude Cuney Hare has an article on Creole Folksongs in the July number of the Musical Observer. Needless to say, Mrs. Hare's article is adequate . . . certainly there are few people more authoritative in their speaking of Creole folksongs than she.

Aaron Douglas is doing the illustrations for Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven which will appear August the twentieth. The Publisher's Weekly says that Mr. Douglas' advertisement for this book in the current magazines is the best for the month of June . . . but by far the most important thing about Mr. Douglas these days is his new wife. He married Miss Alta Sawyer of Kansas City, Missouri, on Friday June eighteenth. . . . The English edition of Langston Hughes' Weary Blues came out on July ninth . . . the second edition of The New Negro will be out in the fall. . . . The Negro writers must not let the first of September slip up on them without having their manuscripts ready for the Albert and Charles Boni contest. The address for sending the novels to the judges is 66 Fifth Avenue. . . . Thinking of novels makes me recall what Simeon Strunsky of the New York Times Book Review said not so long ago about beautifully written books. . . . "The beautifully written book as a rule is the over-written book. One sinks into beauty ankle-deep." He goes to quite some trouble to poke fun at the elegant conservatism of what is called beautiful prose today. But even in the face of Mr. Strunsky's caustic remarks on the question of beautiful writing, properly so-called, I should be ever so happy to find some of that ankle-deep beauty in the things that come out of. the Boni contest . . . what of it, if some Negro should write a Marie Chapdelaine with its wistful but perfect simplicity or perhaps an "Ethan Frome. . . Mr. Strunsky rambles on to the amazing consolation that "We still have our newspapers. In them are the reservoirs of simple health upon which we can draw when the English language threatens to cave in under heavy doses of beauty between bound covers" . . . and we can do little else but wonder how any one can live in New York and sec the rife yellow journaysm of the daily news sheets and speak of them as the salvation of the English language . . . nor even the aridity of the New York Times could be set on the pinnacle that had been built for "beautiful writing."

"George Sand Reigns Again For A Day" in the Times for June twenty-seventh made me think of a young newspaper writer I knew in Paris who was always breaking into any conversation that chanced to be going on at the time with the information that he lived in the back part of a house the front part of which had belonged to George Sand . . . and I always think within myself that I could see in that about as much claim to fame as any. . . . F. Fraser Bond in reviewing The Best Love Stories of 1925: "Something has come over the American love story. ... It seems to have grown up. No longer does it find its chief concern in the billings and cooings of tepid adolescents" ... he goes on further to observe that "Peter Pan has put on long trousers." Can't you see some E. E. Cumings-John V. Weaver person coming forward with a "Come out of it Lovers" to scare away that something that has "come over" the love story of today. . . .

Hall Johnson's Negro operetta, Goophered; with the libretto by Garret is to have in it thre: lyrics by Langston Hughes: Mother to Son; The Midnight Blues; and Song for a Banjo. This operetta is for early fall or late summer production. Mr. Johnson is the winner of the third prize of the music section of the OPPORTUNITY Contest . . . and by the way, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes are collaborating on an operetta the libretto of which is to be by Miss Hurston and the lyrics by Mr. Hughes . . . they are also writing a musical comedy together. . . . Mentioning musical comedies of a" dusky character reminds me of the ill-fated My Magnolia which ran for a single week at the Mansfield Theater.

Jean Toomer, author of Cane, is spending the summer at the Gurdjieff Institute in Fountainbleau, France. . . . Countse Cullen and his father, Reverend Cullen, are traveling through Europe for the summer months . . . they will make many interesting stops chief among them a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. . . . Arthur Huff Fauset whose "Symphonesque" won first prize in the short story section of the OPPORTUNITY contest is to be a member of their party. . . . Dr. Rudolph Fisher has very endearingly nick-named his new baby "the new Negro."

Friday, July sixteenth, the annual reception for summer school students was given at the 135th Street Library. Mr. Johnson of OPPORTUNITY spoke on the OPPORTUNITY contests and what they had meant to the younger school of writers. When Mr. Johnson had finished his speech he called on several of the prize winners of the first and second OPPORTUNITY contests who chanced to be in the audience and asked them to read. . . . "Golgatha Is A Mountain" was never so lovely for me until I heard Mr. Arna Bontfcmp read it himself. He reads with a voice as rich in its resonance as his prize-winning poem is in its imagery and beauty. It was good to see so many of the people who are writing and doing things together . . . Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Nugent, John Davis . . . Langston Hughes who talked a bit about blues and spirituals and then read some of the new ones he had been doing . . . and just before he sat down he read a poem called "Brass Spittoons" ... as lovely as are many things with much more delectable names.

Horace Liveright js busy casting his play Black Boy for its fall production. Paul Robeson is to play the lead which I understand is to be a prize-fighter. I heard Mr. Liveright say the other night that he was having difficulty in finding an actress for the role of Irene who plays in the lead opposite Mr. Robeson. This part is difficult to fill since the heroine is supposed all during the play to be white and is discovered at the end to be a colored girl who "passes." Remembering the harmful publicity that attended the opening of All God's Chillun because of a white woman's playing opposite a Negro, Mr. Liveright has been leaving no stone unturned to find a Negro girl who can take the part. There are hundreds who are fitted for the physical requirements of the piece but few whose histrionic powers would measure up to the standard of Broadway production.

Clarissa Scott of Washington dropped into the office the other day on her first trip in the interest of the new social investigation work she is to be doing in New York this summer . . . the same Clarissa Scott whose Solace won a prize in the OPPORTUNITY contest for last year . . . and it was good to see her again and to know that she would be in New York all the summer . . . sandwiched between talk of what was happening in Washington and at Howard the question arose as to what was the most beautiful line of poetry written by a Negro . . . her first thought was:

Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;
Lord Death has found her sweet.

from Counter Cullen's A Brown Girl Dead . . . strange how discussions of this sort get started, isn't it? I had never thought in terms of the best or most beautiful or the greatest line of Negro poetry before . . . there are several that come in line for the distinction now that I come to think of it . . . without thinking too long my first choice is from Langston Hughes' new blues poem called The Railroad Blues. . . .

A railroad bridge is a sad song in de air

or

Where twilight h a soft bandanna handkerchief
. . . or perhaps Lewis Alexander's
A body smiling with black beauty . . .

or jean Toomers

Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky, cane-lipped throngs.

We wonder what William Stanley Braithwaite would say . . . or Claude McKay . . . or Jessie Fauset. . . . But all that resolves itself into the hopelessness of deciding what the greatest of anything is . . . nothing is really greatest but greatness itself. . . .

The Ebony Flute

By GWENDOLYN BENNETT

WITH timely alacrity Langston Hughes has thrown his hat into the intellectual ring with the pretty compliment of one poet to another. . . . I think Countee's lines,

The dead are wisest for they know
How deep the roots of roses grow.

is very beautiful." . . . There has been a goodly response to the question as to what is the greatest or most beautiful line of poetry written by a Negro. . . . It is of incident interest that Robert Frost says the finest lines submitted to the 1926 OPPORTUNITY contest are from Helene Johnson's The Road, namely:

Ah, little road, brown as my race is brown,
Your trodden beauty like our trodden Pride,
Dust of the dust, they must not bruise you down.

Kinckle Jones suggests that his favorite is:

Yet would we die as some have done:
Beating a way for the rising sun.

from Arna Bontemps' The Daybreakers. . . . And Aaron Douglas chooses from Jean Toomer's Georgia Dusk these lines:

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
An orgy for some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

. . . speaking of poetry calls to mind the announcement of William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology for 1926. It is to have a larger scope this year. It is to be divided into four parts, i.e., The Poetry of the United States, Anthology of Poems 1926, Yearbook of American Poetry, and A Biographical Dictionary of Poets in the United States. The first section includes articles by Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Glenn Hughes, James Southall Wilson, Dawson Powell, Willard Johnson, George Sterling, Thomas Walsh, Henry Harrison, Alain Locke, Josel Washington Hall, Marianne Moore, Joseph Auslander, and E. Merrill Root. . . . There will be many of the younger Negro writers represented in his coming volume. Golgotha is a Mountain, by Arna Bontemps; No Images, by Waring Cuney; Northboun', by Lucy Ariel Williams; Tragedy of Pete, by Joseph Cotter; Lines to Elders, Scornful Lady and Confession, by Countee Cullen; Magula, Fulfillment and Calla Bella, by Helene Johnson . . . these are to be among those printed this year . . . they are either prize or mention winners in the 1926 OPPORTUNITY Contest . . . the book will be ready October twenty-first and its price is to be four dollars. . . . William Rose Benet writes me ever so pleasant a letter in which he says: "I am flattered that you like "Harlem," and glad that you should use the term "The Ebony Flute" for a heading to your column, which column seems to me an excellent idea." . . .

Bruce Nugent, whose Sahdji appeared in the New Negro, has finished his first novel. As yet he has not named it . . . by the way, Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, is to be on the stands the twentieth of August. However, the review copies are out and I was fortunate enough to see and read one of them. For me it is a splendid book. Mr. Van Vechten has done what I choose to call a perfect piece of research work . . . of it Isabel M. Paterson says in "Turns With a Bookworm"; "It is going to occupy much the same position this coming autumn as The Green Hat did last year." . . . We also had the rare privilege of glancing hurriedly over the proof for Tropic Death, Eric Walrond's book ... it certainly has "flights of bright delight." He weaves the warm magic of the tropics with simple words and bright colors. Drought, which appeared in the London New Age, is heavy with its weight of heat and aridity. The author's careful description leaves the reader's 4ips parched and dry. This excerpt fairly bakes with white heat:

"The sun had milked the land of its moisture—pressed it dry. Star apples, sug...