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years after the Civil War (1861-1865), the abolition of slavery
did not bring the automatic acceptance of the black people into
the “big family” of White America. The fact that black
culture and literature as well were linked to the black political,
social and economic experience was noticed by W.E.B. Du Bois in
his book The Soul of the Black Folk (1903), where he says that work,
culture, and liberty – are needed, not singly but together,
since each grows and aids each. Black literature concerning black
life is thus not only a mirror of different époques, ideas
and ideologies, but also an expression of the high education of
the black people.
Seeking
an imagined opportunity for economic and political improvement in
the expanding industrial cities of the North, many Southern blacks
migrated there. In the early 1900s, those who flooded into New York
followed the typical pattern of migrating groups, gravitating towards
areas where people of their own culture have already established
themselves. In New York this place was Harlem. (Lennox Birch 32)
Harlem
offered the black people the opportunity to prove their identity
previously denied them. Nathan Huggins describes the twenties in
Harlem as “a point of change”.
This summit of black culture developed from some historical elements
such as: the aggressive protests of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, organization created by Booker
T. Washington in 1909, the ferment of the Great Migration, World
War I and its aftermath, and “Garveysm.” In 1923, Marcus
Garvey awakened pride in blackness and the conviction that “black
is beautiful,” with unprecedented vigor. It was called “back-to-Africa
movement” and it had an impressive number of supporters. If
Garvey was a hero to the uneducated, he was a charlatan, a dangerous
demagogue to virtually every educated person of color. He had himself
proclaimed Provisional President of the African Republic and appeared
in public in a resplendent uniform with plumed hat, accompanied
by deputies. The faithful followers were rewarded with membership
in honorary orders like the Knights of the Nile, and the Distinguished
Service Order of Ethiopia. His Black Star Line, formed to demonstrate
the value of self-improvement and especially of black business activity,
managed to dissipate completely the $750,000 capital in less than
three years. In 1923, Garvey was convicted of using the mails to
defraud and was sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. He
was pardoned and deported in 1927, and died in London in 1940 in
almost total obscurity.
Trying to prove the uniqueness of their cultural inheritance, the
writers of the Harlem Renaissance turned to the art and music of
their African ancestors, thus bringing into relief their sound conviction
that “the black American was not a cultural orphan”,
as Eva Lennox Birch says in her essay “Harlem and the First
Black Renaissance” (36).
Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston believed very much in the
authenticity of the language used in oral communication by the black
population in the Deep South especially, and they knew that their
literary success depended upon their use of non-literary language
and idioms of the blacks, associated with standard and literary
English. Fighting against Alain Locke’s idea of promoting
an artistic elite to speak for the silenced majority, these two
writers and Wallace Thurman founded a magazine called Fire! in which
Harlem writers voiced their fears that art founded on a propagandist
or elitist base would become vitiated, as well as their resistance
to white standardization. In 1926, in his article on “The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” published in The Nation,
Hughes expressed the aims of these Harlem writers who regarded Hughes’s
words as a kind of manifesto:
We
younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual
dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased,
we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we
are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are
not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our
temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top
of the mountain free within ourselves. (in Lennox Birch 36)
In
the same article, Hughes pointed out the double bind in which black
writers were caught: on one hand their financial dependence upon
white patrons, and on the other hand their being constrained by
political pressures from black leaders. Langston Hughes and Zora
Neale Hurston both depended on the financial assistance of a rich
white woman, Ms. Osgood Mason, who in return insisted on being called
“Godmother” and also claimed editorial rights to their
work. That is why Hurston refers to the Renaissance in Harlem as
something “so-called” and insists on the fact that the
“rebirth” was limited. Hughes also describes the gradual
appropriation of Harlem by whites. They come to listen to black
musicians and rich whites flooded the cabarets and bars where only
blacks drank, laughed, talked and sang before. White people with
money are given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the
black customers who were “like amusing animals in a zoo”
(37). It was now that black artists were shown off, and exhibited,
and presented to all sorts of white people with the obvious aim
of getting some financial support. But the terms used can be properly
applied to valuable works of art, or to freaks or performing animals,
but not to human beings.
This
feature of the Renaissance, when blacks were lionized and petted,
illustrates the constraints under which the writers worked. As exhibits
they were owned, or at least controlled by their own political leaders
or by rich white patrons. What had begun in the Harlem of the 1920s
as an exciting, vibrant explosion of black creativity, with the
possibility of regeneration and selfdefinition, had become considerably
muted by the mid-1930s.The race riots of 1935 were both an expression
of black discontent and an acknowledgement that Booker T. Washington’s
dream of full and equal status for the blacks in American society
was still just that – a dream. (37)
Even
so, young black writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and
Claude McKay rediscovered the primitive virtues of spontaneity,
joy, energy and sensuality of the Renaissance. The liberation from
the white standards and values was reached by the reaffirmation
of the American past, the use of dialect, the admiration and imitation
of folk music and folklore. In this period, which Francis Scott
Fitzgerald called “the Jazz Age,” the identification
with the spirit of jazz, the celebration of sensuality, the belief
in improvisation, and authenticity of feeling became the ideology
not only of blacks, but also of whites.
Toomer, a great representative of the Harlem Renaissance, too, in
the first part of his work Cane (1923) – a part consisting
of sketches, stories, poems, and a short play – spotlights
the rural, stable dimension of the blacks’life in the South,
in Sparta, Georgia. The second part, which is moved into the Cities
of Washington and Chicago, describes a sterile life corrupted by
the urban materialism and dominated by white values. Thus, the effect
of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban centers
of the North, the hardships caused by the low-paying and day-and-night
work, the returning to the land working in the South, or the high
rate of suicides play their extremely important role in the alienation
of black people. Cane is an indirect protest against the white system,
which indulged the creation of such a society, and against the effects
of the long years of slavery, which made black man dependent on
plantations.
Toomer also describes the intra-relationships within the black society.
He reflects the familial instability which was a characteristic
of the time and presents black women as the rich source of life,
in spite of their sexual and racial victimization. More than half
a century after it had been published, Alice Walker confessed: “Cane
has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it
passionately; could not possibly exist without it” (In Search
of Our Mothers’ Gardens 259).
As regards the way in which the Renaissance writers mirrored the
life of their people we must also mention Langston Hughes’s
interest throughout all his work, from The Negro Speaks of Rivers
in 1921, in which he celebrates the black historical experience
and its influence on the soul, to his last volume of poetry, The
Panther and the Lash, in 1967, in which he explores the aspects
of the black urban experience. Focusing on the life of Harlem, a
life of swirling emotions, he passes from the directness of violent
racial confrontation, death and murder in the streets, to the subtle
nuances of blues singers in the night clubs, and to the gospel singing
in the storefront churches in order to present his people’s
manners, their talk, their music and dances, their clothes, their
thoughts and their dreams. Hughes dealt also with the life of the
black family and in his novel, Not without Laughter (1930), he described
the life of a colored mid-western town boy, whose drama emerged
from his inability to laugh and, in this way, to surpass the accumulating
poverty, the conflicting forces which had divided his family.
Although the women writers had to struggle both against racism,
the strongly male-dominated cultural theory, as well as against
the biased practice of the Harlem Renaissance, two women writers
can be mentioned here for their art in depicting the black society
of the time. They belong to the so-called “Rear Guard”
of the Black Renaissance, not so radical in their works, but “ultrarespectable.”
One is J.R. Fauset, the other one, Nella Larsen.
Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novels familiarize the reader with
the problems of female sexual identity and with the racial conflict.
They show the permutation between power and powerlessness as a result
of the fusion of race and gender together. In her novel Plum Bun
(1929) she deals with the theme of “passing” which has
a double meaning: on the one hand she speaks about the struggle
of the mulatto against sexual politics and racial prejudices, and
on the other hand she refers to the situation of the woman artist
who must conceal (or sacrifice) her life vision in response to social
definitions of femininity.
Nella Larsen, the other representative woman writer of the Harlem
Renaissance, explores in her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing
(1929) the similar theme of female sexuality and frustrated ambitions.
Helga Crane, the heroine of Quicksand, the daughter of a white mother
and a black father, begins her career as a teacher at the Naxon
Southern Negro College and then moves to Harlem, which provides
her a temporary refuge. After a romance with a portrait painter
in Denmark, her mother’s native country, she returns to Harlem.
Disappointed with her failure in love, she marries the Reverend
Green, a pastor who comforted her in a helpless moment. She thus
has “to like it or lump it” when she accompanies him
to a small town in Alabama County, becomes a child bearer and a
domestic drudge. Like any other woman of her social condition, age
and color, Helga is both a victim of the chains that tie her to
the yoke of black folk, which she has despised, and of the lack
of familial stability.
In the aftermath of the Harlem Renaissance, during the difficult
era of the Great Depression, the most outstanding representative
of the black literature was Richard Nathaniel Wright. His childhood
was a time of hunger – for food, for affection, for understanding,
for friendship, and for education. Deeply influenced during the
first stage of his literary career (1933-1940) by naturalism, existentialism,
and above all, communism, Wright later claimed that he had learned
from the iconoclastic journalist H. L. Mencken how one could use
words as weapons. He contended that all good literature had to be
protest literature, and he illustrated his point of view in Native
Son (1940), a real document about the life of the blacks in the
urban areas of the 1940s. An illustration of the American racial
dilemma and a novel of high artistic merit, Native Son materialized
Wright’s intimate knowledge of black urban life, his experience
in the South and his communist ideology, and made its protagonist
Bigger Thomas, a powerful, real portrait of a rebellious black man
formed, or better said deformed, by the American racial system.
Similarly, the heroes of Wright’s short story collection Uncle
Tom’s Children: Four Novellas (1938) had to also face white
oppression and racial conflicts which resulted in physical violence
and had to resist them either by individual flight (in Big Boy Leaves
Home), through protection of the family (in Down by the Riverside),
or by directed, collective resistance (in Fire and Cloud). In all
these tales, set in the Deep South, Wright notably showed his skill
in writing communist-style narrations, but also his gift for writing
far less didactic fictions.
Native Son, the above mentioned collection, his pictorial history
Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), his well-known and appreciated
autobiographical novel Black Boy (1945),and his posthumous collection
of stories Eight Men (1961) and the novel Lawd Today (1961) influenced
a whole generation of black novelists. Those writers influenced
by Wright in their literary careers, his contemporaries, included:
Ann Petry, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, Owen Dodson, Dorothy
West and William Demby. Later, they were dubbed part of the “Wright
School of Writers.”
It is true that Wright had been the leading figure of the 1930s,
but, as I have shown, he also bred many successors in the years
to come. Ralph Ellison is an outstanding one. Born in Oklahoma,
a Southern state with a mild tradition of slavery, Ellison felt
it his duty to reveal what he himself felt, rather than what he
thought that the other people of color were supposed to feel. He
always considered that the Oklahoma black people had “a tradition
of aggressiveness” in preserving their budding identity, and
life there was not so tightly structured as it would have been in
the traditional South.
Ellison’s single, massive novel, Invisible Man, was published
in 1952, and it is the story of an unnamed black protagonist who
moves through the stages of modern American Black history: the beginning,
is about his Deep Southern childhood; then the protagonist attends
a Negro College supported by Northern philanthropy (Ellison himself
attended Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington); the
next stage brings into attention industrial factory work in New
York; then the reader is told about the protagonist’s exposure
to the Negro ferment in Harlem: a “back-to-Africa” anti-colonialist
movement and a communist-like organization called simply “the
Brotherhood”; then there comes the “hipster” scene,
and finally, the protagonist ends by writing his memoir, in a fantastic
underground retreat from which he meditates on the necessity of
returning to the surface. But to what new phase of the black experience
this time? Because any possibility of getting back to the past is
rejected.
The Invisible Man can be interpreted as a kind of anti-Ellison,
lacking his creator’s exceptional childhood, his feelings
for the values of a black heritage. The book as such bears the mark
of inspiration from American writers like Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Both Ralph Ellison and the next outstanding writer meant to bring
“change” in the field of black literature, James Baldwin,
although deeply influenced by Richard Wright in the beginning of
their careers, found themselves in conscious rebellion against their
precursor. They believed he suffered from a provinciality of imagination,
despite the fact that Wright lived many years as an expatriate in
Paris and he was in contact with international personalities like
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Nevertheless, the only conclusion
I would reach is that in Ellison’s desire to explore his own
experience as a human being with the fullest possible freedom he
created one of the most outstanding novels of the mid 20th century.
James Baldwin, the most important black writer who emerged between
the mid-fifties and mid-sixties, did not begin as a partisan of
the protest literature. On the contrary, having been in opposition
with his father who died in 1943, within a year later Baldwin adopted
Richard Wright’s figure as his spiritual father and what followed
was very simple: Baldwin’s habit of defining himself in opposition
to “the name of the father” was transferred to the new
relationship. Thus, if Wright was committed to protest literature,
Baldwin launched himself into his own artistic career with a fiery
essay called Everybody’s Protest Novel. His novels and essays
do deal with the black people’s cause; they link the identity
problems with those of white oppression in colonial system in an
age when the search for both an ethnic and a historical identity
was being reaffirmed the concept of negritude.
The best of his novels is Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). According
to Bone, “It ranks with Jean Toomer’s Cane, Richard
Wright s Native Son, and Ralph Ellison s Invisible Man as a major
contribution to American fiction” (218). In dealing with the
world’s postwar concern with the problems of personal identity,
its main hero belongs to the numberless armies of darkness and must
forever share their pain, but somehow, at the same time, he has
to find his own identity and to alleviate his own suffering, in
order to find his inner peace.
Giovanni’s Room (1956) is by far the weakest of Baldwin’s
novels. Its action goes backward linking itself to Go Tell It on
the Mountain, and forward towards the next novel, Another Country.
“The characters are vague and disembodied, the themes half-digested,
the colors rather bleached than vivified. We recognize in his sterile
psychic landscape the unprocessed raw material of art” (Bone
226).
As regards the intra-relationships within the black family, Baldwin’s
If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) has a black woman as its central
character and it presents black woman in diverse roles.
Although he had also written three collections of essays: Notes
of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire
Next Time (1963), and two plays: The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues
for Mr. Charlie (1964), his most outstanding literary piece of work
remains beyond question his first novel. In his book The Negro Novel
in America, in chapter 10, entitled “James Baldwin,”
Robert A. Bone says: “I find Baldwin strongest as an essayist,
weakest as a playwright and successful in the novel form on only
one occasion” (215).
Escaping the pattern of African-American literature of her times,
male dominated and whose most-often-dealt-with themes were racial
affirmation and radical racial protest, Zora Neale Hurston shifted
the focus of her work to the black womanhood. “She emerges
as a complex, tragic and talented figure; a woman who had to combat
the societal pressures exercised by class, race, gender and religion”
(Lennox Birch 39). Being not the only woman writer in Harlem, she
shared very much in common with Nella Larsen, for instance. Like
the latter, Hurston explored and presented the dilemma of the educated
mulatta and their search for a meaningful position in the American
society, engaged with sexual and racial politics, and brought also
into discussion the most problematic area of the ambiguous nature
of female sexuality. Both women writers created and published within
a male dominated literary milieu, and both had to combat the sexism
and racism in their lives, facts which they used as the raw material
of their fictions.
In her “Forward” to Robert E. Hemenway’s Zora
Neale Hurston – A Literary Biography (1980), Alice Walker
makes for the reader two of the shortest, but most realistic and
shocking descriptions of the Southern black woman writer: “Zora,
who became an orphan at nine, a runaway at fourteen, a maid and
manicurist (because of necessity and not from love of the work)
before she was twenty, with one dress, managed to become Zora Neale
Hurston, author and anthropologist at all” (in Hemenway xvii).
“She was funny, irreverent (she was the first to call the
Harlem Renaissance literati “the niggerati”), good looking
and sexy” (in Hemenway xiv).
Author of four novels, a book of folklore, an autobiography, and
more than fifty essays and short stories, Hurston always dealt with
historical and social aspects, which disturbed the already agitated
lives of the black people in her time. During the thirties and forties,
black authors did not receive much acceptance, and publishers did
not court them. If their work was not about racial problems, and
Hurston’s were not, they did not sell well at all. That is
why this spicy black woman writer, who was like a gift from God
to all her kinship writers in the post Harlem Renaissance period,
left this world in a relative obscurity in 1960, the year which
also marked the death of another native son of black America, Richard
Wright.
She had collected folklore on large areas in the rural South, and
the fruit of her researches were published in Mules and Men (1935),
the first popular book about the life, culture and folklore of the
blacks written by an African-American. Her best novel, Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937) is regarded, even now, as one of the most
poetic works of fiction written by a black writer in the first half
of the twentieth century. Both white and black American critics
have favorably compared this book to Richard Wright’s Native
Son, and they have pointed out that it manages to express Hurston’s
own hopes for a meaningful place in a male-dominated world. It is
the story of Janie’s grandmother who lived in a slave society
and who tried to teach Janie the rules a black woman has to follow
in order to survive: in a black community characterized by lack
of money, of power and of social position, she must subdue to the
white man and she must act according to the circumstances, and not
according to her own feelings. But young Janie does not want to
follow her granny’s pieces of advice and breaks this rule
in order to find her own happiness and fulfillment in life. Unlike
other black women who find in work a compensation for the lack of
their husband’s love, Janie finds her liberation by creating
a balance between love and work. In the end, her love affair fails,
when her beloved “Tea Cake”, enraged by the biting of
a rabid dog, attacks her, and she kills him in self-defense. But
the female-female relationship proves to be both stronger and more
successful, as shown in the case of intimacy between Janie and Phoeby.
By telling Phoeby the story of her life, Janie finds another way
of surmounting the hardships of her life: that of creativity, of
re-creating herself through introspection and storytelling.
I hope I am not mistaken if I take Zora for Janie and Janie for
Zora. In fact, they are both black poor Southern females who strive
hard after their aims in life. And for a certain period of time
they could be viewed as winners who cannot make without laughter.
But only Zora’s laughter was remembered. “It was a laughter
born of the pain of being poor, black and female” (Lennox
Birch 39).
In 1949 Gwendolyn Brooks, the best-known and most successful black
poet of the postwar years became the first black writer to win the
Pulitzer Prize with Annie Allen. During the first decades of her
career strongly encouraged by Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson,
she worked hard to express the lives of the urban poor she knew
well, the Chicagoans especially creating rather black portraits
than a picture of the black way of protesting. She wrote about love,
hate, fear, tragedies, triumphs and deaths which inextricably intertwine
the lives and destinies of the black people very much like those
of the people belonging to any other race. In her first book A Street
in Bronzeville, she hoped her readers would admit that black people
did not differ from other races except by color. She dealt with
common themes, and very much like Phillis Wheatley and Countee Cullen
before her; she made use of both the biblical speech of black preachers
and the vivid talk of the ghetto inhabitants. She began and continued
for a long time as a poet in the orthodox literary tradition, writing
sonnets and short lyrics, and using strongly accented and rhymed
lines.
In the late sixties, no longer content with what Langston Hughes
had called “the ordinary aspects of black life”, the
reader finds out a new Gwendolyn Brooks, who undertook a radical
change of direction. She acquired a black publisher and wrote primarily
for black audiences. The traditional forms of her early poetry were
gone then and her new poetic creation juxtaposed fragments of anger,
bafflement and protest.
A first and natural conclusion to be drawn is that an astonishing
burst of creativity among black women writers, beginning with Gwendolyn
Brooks and Paule Marshall, and continuing with younger artists like
Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and the even more
popular author Alice Walker, brought about a much – dreamed
– of resurrection of women written literature.
WORKS CITED
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. With
a Foreword by Alice Walker. Urbana and Chicago: U. of Illinois P.,
1980.
Lennox Birch, Eva. Black American Women’s Writing. A Quilt
of Many Colours. Leicester: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Womanist
Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
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