1920 (44 page)

Even though he died in 1976, Robeson continues to be punished for his intransigence, his role in the history books continually diminished even though there has never been anyone like him in our nation: a superb athlete who played baseball and basketball in college as well as football; a glorious singer; a skilled actor in both light and serious roles, yet never accepting a role that made the black man a caricature; a trained lawyer; and a leading man in the fields of racial and political reform. At the height of American segregation, one of the country's few “Renaissance” men was black.

NO LESS ENDURING THAN THE
music of the Harlem Renaissance has been the writing, in which such authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Walter White, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, among others, did precisely what the white man and woman of letters were doing at the same time: remaking their literature. They produced work that was bolder, more personal, and more voluminous than it used to be. And, in their case, more distinctly African-American. But it was a white man, and an unlikely one at that, who played a major role, often unacknowledged, in legitimizing the black literary sensibility of the twenties.

H. L. Mencken, who frequently gave off the scent of anti-Semitism while including many Jews among his closest friends, was similarly contradictory about African-Americans. Those biographers of Mencken who defend his attitude toward blacks, despite the many racist comments
he uttered in his lifetime, adopt a believe-what-he-did-not-what-he-said attitude toward their subject—and what he did was serious, sleeves-rolled-up, suspenders-yanked-off-the-shoulders editing and advising. “Long before
Native Son
established Richard Wright as a Pulitzer prize-winning author,” writes Mencken scholar Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, “he had discovered what members of the Harlem Renaissance, already in full swing by 1926, had recognized for themselves: that H. L. Mencken was a force in their own literary movement. That year, [novelist] Carl Van Vechten's best-selling
Nigger Heaven
paid Mencken homage by identifying him as the editor responsible for the success of black literature.”

Like all gifted critics, Mencken knew what would happen before it started, because he knew where to look, what to feel; he could sense the growth and energy that would soon be apparent to all; and starting in 1920, when he was editing the fashionable magazine
The Smart Set
, Mencken began to spend more and more of his time encouraging African-American writers and social commentators. Among them was James Weldon Johnson. “Mencken had made a sharper impression on my mind than any American then writing,” Johnson later said. “I had never been so fascinated at hearing anyone talk. He talked about literature, about Negro literature, the Negro problem, and Negro music.” Johnson said that after his conversation, he felt “buoyed up … as though I had taken a mental cocktail.”

Perhaps what is most remarkable about Mencken as an editor of African-American prose and poetry was the time he devoted to it, dedicating himself to authors who had never really been able to call themselves that before, men and women who had never previously been published. But a black writer, Mencken believed, had a sense of hope that had grown out of his centuries of sorrow, a view of himself of being integral to the world around him, even a part of it. The white author, according to Mencken, had neither. It was these qualities that he sought to encourage, the sentiment even more than the conventional notions of literary skill.

Mencken, however, had nothing to do with what might be called the magnum opus of the Harlem Renaissance, a collection of essays which in sum were a cultural history, called
The Gift of Black Folk
, by W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociologist and historian who himself might be called the magnum
intellect of the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, and his scholarship is evident through the more than 350 pages of his book. As is his passion for the black man's contribution to American culture. “The Negro is primarily an artist,” he wrote, and then tried to explain, with admitted difficulty, near the book's end.

Above and beyond all that we have mentioned, perhaps least tangible but just as true, is the peculiar spiritual quality which the Negro has injected into American life and civilization. It is hard to define or characterize it—a certain spiritual joyousness; a sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to the cool and cautious New England reason; a slow and dreamful conception of the universe, a drawling and slurring of speech, an intense sensitiveness to spiritual values—all these things and others like them, tell of the imprint of Africa on Europe. There is no gainsaying or explaining away this tremendous influence of the contact of the north and south, of black and white, of Anglo Saxon and Negro.

ANOTHER WHITE MAN WITH A
strong yet unlikely relationship to the artistic arousal of African-Americans was T. S. Eliot, or so cultural historian Ann Douglas believes, relating that

English contemporaries [of Eliot] like Wyndham Lewis and Clive Bell saw [Eliot's 1922 modernist epic]
The Waste Land
as a form of “jazz,” and the comparison bespeaks not only a loose use of the word but an important cultural connection. Eliot's hometown, St. Louis, with its large black population and rich Negro musical culture, was in many ways a Southern metropolis, and the young Eliot described his own accent as that of “a Southern boy with a nigger drawl.” … He once signed himself (on a postcard to Ezra Pound) “Tar Baby.” … Tom Eliot had dreamed of donning darker guises, of shaping his image by the blackface in the mirror, and he experimented with minstrel personae and language as he was perfecting
his craft in the years after the Great War. [He insisted] that his poetic instrument was not the lute, with its classical and romantic connotations, but the jazz-harmonica of African American music.

To me, this seems evidence of an aberrant wistfulness, if not even perversity, by Eliot the boy more than it does true kinship to the Harlem Renaissance by Eliot the man. In the seventeen years that he edited
The Criterion
, a British literary magazine he founded in 1922, never once did Eliot publish the work of a black American. Seldom, in fact, did he publish an article in support of the Harlem Renaissance or even acknowledge its influence in places outside New York. Mencken, on the other hand, often printed the works of black writers in
The Smart Set
and in a later journal that he co-founded,
American Mercury
.

And such esteemed white writers as Hart Crane, Waldo Frank, and Sherwood Anderson also shared Mencken's attitude. Not only did they support the artistic haven that Harlem had become; they were virtual students of it, especially of Jean Toomer, a male despite his name and one of Harlem's leading poets and novelists. What the three famed white American artists “hoped to get from their friendship with black moderns like Toomer,” Douglas tells us, “was the Negro genius for religious feeling, the saving expressiveness that American Calvinism in their view had conspicuously lacked.”

For instance, in Jean Toomer's “Conversion”:

African guardian of souls,

Drunk with rum,

Feasting on strange cassava,

Yielding to new words and a weak palabra

Of a white-faced, sardonic god—

Grins, cries

Amen,

Shouts hosanna.

Langston Hughes, however, was the most exceptional of the Harlem literati, not to mention the most versatile—a novelist and newspaper columnist, a
playwright, and an author of children's books, short stories, and works of nonfiction about the black experience in the United States. But, as if that were not enough, Hughes is best known, and most accomplished, as a poet. At the age of twenty-two, having dropped out of Columbia because he thought it racially prejudiced, he somehow landed a job as personal assistant to the eminent Carter G. Woodson. Hughes was thrilled. Like so many bright young black men, Hughes respected Woodson, admired his work ethic, looked up to his intellectual attainments, and was determined to equal them.

He began assisting Woodson as soon as he was able, less than a month later, with a burst of enthusiasm, a glow of pride.

A few days after that, he quit.

Woodson, although not visibly upset, was surprised. Hughes explained to him that although the work was edifying and Woodson himself an inspiration, the hours were too long, leaving him no time to develop his own writing skills. He told Woodson, with unwavering determination, that he had reached the point in his life at which he needed to concentrate on those skills to the exclusion of all else. Woodson had already seen the artist in Hughes, heard it when Hughes spoke, knew that it must find expression—and so he said he understood. Woodson wished the young man well; they parted with mutual good wishes.

Hughes immediately started looking for other work and had no trouble finding it. It did not, however, have quite the same cachet as the position he had left. In fact, what it had were dirty dishes, half-filled mugs of cold coffee, and napkins balled up and sticky. Within a week or two, Langston Hughes had found employment as a busboy, and he walked happily to and from a less-than-elegant restaurant for his daily duties.

His friends were stunned, disbelieving.
A busboy?
Hughes smiled at their consternation and tried to explain. A position as a busboy made fewer demands on his time. The restaurant was not open in the morning; he arose early and wrote until close to noon. The new job also made fewer demands on his mind: he could clear tables at the same time that he quietly recited lines of verse he would jot down on a notepad in the kitchen when he had a spare moment.

Hughes's earliest poems, not surprisingly, were heavily influenced by jazz. Note, not just the title or even the words, but the short, syncopated
lines. “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” for instance, reads like song lyrics more than conventional poetry.

Play that thing,

Jazz band!

Play it for the lords and ladies,

For the dukes and counts,

For the whores and gigolos,

For the American millionaires,

And the school teachers

Out for a spree.

Play it,

Jazz band!

You know that tune

That laughs and cries at the same time.

You know it.

Similarly, there was “Song for a Banjo Dance.”

Shake your brown feet, honey,

Shake your brown feet, chile,

Shake your brown feet, honey,

Shake 'em swift and wil'—

Get way back, honey,

Do that rockin' step.

Slide on over, darling,

Now! Come out

With your left.

Shake your brown feet, honey.

Shake 'em, honey chile.

Hughes's musically inspired poetry was a phase, his first; he was playing with tempo, not yet confident enough for serious content. Most of the latter
came in such collections as
Scottsboro Limited, Montage of a Dream Deferred
, and the often inspiring
Let America Be America Again
.

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indians, Negro's, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand in the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,

We must take back our land again,

America! …

Out of the wrack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people must redeem

The lands, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain.

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

Countee Cullen, on the other hand, never had a musical phase. A student of the classics, he began his career as a writer by emulating the English poets of centuries past and never stopped, although in time his own voice would emerge from the quiet din of his long-ago mentors. Cullen was Hughes's friend, but his opposite in style. Cullen writes below “On the Mediterranean Sea”:

That weaver of words, the poet who

First named this sullen sea the blue,

And left off painting there, he knew

How rash a man would be to try

Precise defining of such a dye

As lurks within this colored spume.

And for retelling little room

He willed to singers yet unborn

But destined later years, at morn,

High noon, twilight, or night to view. …

Hughes would never have produced such a piece.

Cullen also wrote a short poem about Sacco and Vanzetti, seeming to sympathize with them, to blame their fate on “a slumbering but awful God.” But his shorter poem, another epitaph, this one “For an Anarchist,” makes his position more difficult to understand.

What matters that I stormed and swore?

Not Samson with an ass's jaw,

Not through a forest of hair he wore,

Could break death's adamantine law.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE TOOK PLACE
in academia as well, where its leader was the small, cerebral Alain Locke. A Harvard graduate, he became the first African-American Rhodes scholar, after which he joined the faculty at the all-black Howard University as an assistant professor of literature.

Like Du Bois, Locke would never have been found at a Jim Crow establishment like the Cotton Club. And like Du Bois, Locke would be unhappy with a landmark in American theatre, about which there was much gossip during rehearsals in 1920. Opening the following year,
Shuffle Along
was the first all-black musical revue to claim a Broadway stage. No matter that it ran for 504 performances, and no matter that it made stars out of Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker; both Du Bois and Locke thought
Shuffle Along
perpetuated the most humiliating of racial stereotypes, beginning with the title. It was, after all, written by a white man. Black theatre, Du Bois insisted, should be just that—black, entirely black, starting with the producer and playwright. And even though Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, both African-Americans, were responsible for
Shuffle Along
's music and lyrics, Du Bois believed that they, too, were conforming to stereotypes, giving no indication of the artistic growth of which his people were capable. Locke agreed.