American Fun (33 page)

Private “
rent parties”—“Social Whists”—were the beating heart
of 1920s Harlem fun. Neighborhood kids, Harlem celebrities, downtown slummers, and working-class blacks could pay a small fee (ten cents most nights) to stomp and dance to stride-piano maestros like Willie “the Lion” Smith,
James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, and Fats Waller. More notorious “
buffet flats” also marketed red-light favors, but rent parties were most often just overcrowded blowouts. They were announced with witty flyers, sold soul food and corn liquor, and helped overburdened tenants raise some rent money by packing in just about anybody with a thirst: “
ladies’ maids and truck drivers,” recalled
Langston Hughes, who hit the rent parties nearly every Saturday night, “laundry workers and shoe shine boys, seamstresses and porters. I can still hear their laughter in my ears, hear the soft slow music, and feel the floor shaking as the dancers danced.”

Among America’s brightest stars of the 1920s were three African-American
women—
Ma Rainey,
Bessie Smith, and
Ethel Waters—who joyfully slaughtered any and all sacred cows: of lyricism, of beauty, of public decency. Bessie Smith, in particular, who trained under Rainey and then paved the way for Waters, earned her title as “Empress of the
Blues” through exquisite musicality and thunderous personality. Born poor in Chattanooga in 1894, she was singing for coins by the time she was nine and performing for Rainey at age eighteen, when her voice already was clear enough, strong enough, to captivate audiences without amplification. Deep, rich, conversational, “creamy,” Smith’s voice brought listeners in close and animated her blunt confessions of poverty, promiscuity, and violence, often with a slashing sense of humor. And Smith lived hard. She fired gunshots at her abusive (but beloved) husband,
Jack Gee, identified by the biographer
Chris Albertson as a “
semi-illiterate night watchman.” She was stabbed by a man she’d knocked on his back. She constantly drank, kept a string of female lovers, and enjoyed a buffet flat in Detroit where Coke bottles and “
lighted cigarettes” were sex-show props. She strutted out her antics in her hard-stomping blues, as in “
Gimme a Pigfoot,” in which she growls in pure exuberance over an illegal Harlem rent party. Wanting “to clown,” wanting to send the piano player a drink because he’s “bringin’ [her] down,” she calls for “a pigfoot and a bottle of beer,” warning other revelers to “check [their] razors and [their] guns” because there’s “gonna be rasslin’ when the wagon comes.” As hearty as any celebrity of her hard-living era, Smith freely mingled her dangers and pleasures. Accordingly, as the song roars to its infamous climax, she keeps on raising the stakes:

In Harlem, more intimately even than in Hollywood, celebrities like Rainey, Smith, and Waters walked and partied among the people—as the finest examples
of
the people. Corroborating
Negro Digest
’s claim that it was “
fun to be a Negro” during the 1920s and 1930s,
David Levering Lewis describes the common “pleasure” of “seeing celebrities” such as
James Weldon Johnson, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, Florence Mills, and countless other Harlem dwellers strolling through the “Campus,” the name given to the intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Celebrities heightened the frisson of the crowd, and in doing so with fellow feeling, as is evident in their populist songs and stories, they struck a syncopated jazz dynamic—a race, a dance, a competition—between soaring heights of individual freedom and the thumping rhythms of communal belonging. Bessie Smith and
Louis Armstrong, for instance, were stars
because
they honored their racial community. They infused their every note with its heritage and invited the world to come along.

Among Harlem’s celebrities who cherished their community while embracing their hard-won individual freedom was a rising generation of writers and artists. Musicians worked out their differences onstage in lively, showy cutting contests. These young
intellectuals duked it out in print. Their poetry, novels, essays, and drama took bold new stances on
African-American life. What resulted, among many other innovations, was American literature’s most thorough debate over the harms and health of what this book calls fun—or what J. A. Rogers calls “joyous revolt.” Following a century of blackface minstrelsy and primitivist fantasy, Harlem’s young talents gave their own impressions and at last brought clarity and dignity to a subject—fun, raw fun, African-American fun—that historically had been dismissed as ridiculous.

IN THE MID
-1920s, ranks started to form between the older generation of Harlem’s elite—a black professional class whom DuBois identified as African America’s “Talented Tenth”—and the younger generation of writers, artists, actors, and musicians who preferred to look beyond class differences. Much as it had been in revolutionary Boston, when John and
Samuel Adams were divided over how the new rising citizens should behave, in Harlem the people’s fun became a bone of contention. DuBois wanted to showcase the highest black achievements. With the influx of slummers and the nightlife boom, blacks were too easily fetishized as primitives—a loathsome stereotype that hung like sandbags on the project of racial uplift. The younger crowd resented this stereotype
as well, but they were much more likely, in spite of such popular misperceptions, to look for redemption in the “joyous revolt” of “average” blacks. In it they often saw the vitality of the race.

Complicating matters was
Carl Van Vechten. This white, gangly, forty-something Iowan threw some of the era’s wildest parties and floated among the intercontinental elite—literary, artistic, theatrical, musical, cinematic. He and his wife,
Fania Marinoff (whom
Bessie Smith once decked for kissing her goodnight), were close friends with
Gertrude Stein and
Mabel Dodge. Their celebrity acquaintances included
Clara Bow,
Rudolph Valentino, and
William Randolph Hearst. And at some point in 1922, Van Vechten became, in his own words, “
violently interested in Negroes,” an “addiction” that would lead him to spend the rest of the decade promoting black writers, musicians, and artists and giving distinguished white visitors “tours” of “authentic” Harlem.

It was right in Van Vechten’s line to exploit Harlem’s pleasures, as he did most infamously in his novel
Nigger Heaven
(1926), whose crude title and sensationalistic, salacious content caused an uptown uproar and made this onetime Harlem celebrity persona non grata. Despite its showy arguments against
racism, the novel’s fascination with Harlem’s “
Coney Island” thrills and its fantasy of gaily primitive Africans only gave readers more complex
caricatures than had appeared in recent white American literature—than “
the fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room” of
Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Congo” (1915), than the “
glistening African god of pleasure” who plays ragtime piano in
Willa Cather’s
My Ántonia
(1918). Despite its attempts at psychological accuracy, many of
Nigger Heaven
’s characters, especially the lascivious Scarlet Creeper and the sex-starved
Lasca Sartoris, are astonishing cartoons of black hedonism.

W. E. B. DuBois called the novel “
a blow in the face” and “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of white.” He took special umbrage at the novel’s “caricature” of Harlem life, “the wildly, barbaric drunken orgy in whose details Van Vechten revels.” But he, too, played an avuncular role to younger artists and was careful not to dismiss Harlem fun outright. He admitted “
there is laughter, color, and spontaneity at Harlem’s core” but wished that someone of Van Vechten’s credibility would celebrate “the average colored man”—who attended
church and was “as conservative and as conventional as ordinary working folk everywhere.”

The younger generation voiced their own ideas of “the average colored man”—and they were neither Van Vechten’s nor DuBois’s. Two months prior to
Nigger Heaven
’s publication, the twenty-four-year-old poet
Langston Hughes, a
Columbia University dropout, tossed a firebomb in support of black-cultural art. He called in
The Nation
for revolt against the “
race toward whiteness”—against petit-bourgeois black artists and their “desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization.” Taking implicit aim at their darling
Countee Cullen, a gay poet who would marry DuBois’s daughter in the most elite black social event of the 1920s, Hughes (probably also gay) rejected the “smug, contented, respectable folk” (like Cullen’s parents) who scold their children not to “be like niggers.” Mocking the black middle class for their “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and … Episcopal Heaven,” he urged young black writers to celebrate the “low-down folks” who are in the “majority—may the Lord be praised!” The black urban poor—who were not at all “conservative,” by Hughes’s description—enjoyed “their nip of gin on Saturday nights” and lived by their sometimes dangerous whims. “Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy.… Play awhile. Sing awhile. Oh, let’s dance!” Even “their religion soars to a shout,” since “these common folk are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child.”

Hughes had a personal investment in the subject. The people he praised resembled his easygoing mother and stepfather, who made their “
money to
spend
” and “for fun”—as opposed to his racist and stingy father who scoffed at “
Fun!” and “was interested in making money to keep.” Hughes believed the people’s fun told a truth all its own. Despite its risks and indiscretions, the fun of profligate, low-down folk revealed a vitality in black—and larger American—culture, if only the upper classes would listen: “
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of
Bessie Smith singing
Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.” Many of Hughes’s peers heeded the call, and their writings of the 1920s and 1930s have deepened our knowledge of American fun.

The A-list of these peers—
Arna Bontemps,
Richard Bruce, Countee
Cullen,
Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston,
Helene Johnson, and others—appeared that year in the sole issue of
Fire!!,
a journal “Devoted to Younger Negro Artists” that challenged Harlem’s literary establishment—namely,
Charles Johnson’s
Opportunity
and W. E. B. DuBois’s
Crisis.
Its only editorial was a review of
Nigger Heaven,
in which
Wallace Thurman, the journal’s notoriously hard-living editor, took pains to protect Van Vechten, a friend whose patronage is acknowledged on the journal’s masthead. Thurman predicted that “
Harlem Negroes, once their aversion to the ‘nigger’ in the title was forgotten, would erect a statue on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, and dedicate it to this ultra-sophisticated Iowa New Yorker.” (Van Vechten had recently been lynched there in
effigy.) At the same time, asserting the magazine’s autonomy, Thurman slams the novel’s “effusions about Harlem” for being “pseudo-sophisticated, semi-serious,” and “semi-ludicrous.” He also scoffs at “ignoramuses” who put any stock in the veracity of
Nigger Heaven.
Against both prudery and sensationalism,
Fire!!
defended verisimilitude—the artist’s duty to “delve into deep pots of raw life.” The magazine’s office was engulfed in flames, ironically incinerating most of
Fire!!
’s only issue and plunging Thurman deep in debt, but its brief flame illumined a fearless new aesthetic with which W. E. B. DuBois parted company, and whose scene he called the “
debauched tenth.”

THE FREEWHEELING SPIRIT
of jazz kept Langston Hughes moving in the twenties and thirties. He had an irrepressible sense of fun.
Mae Sullivan recalls Hughes being “
adorable” and “always a little boy.” He was born in Missouri and often relocated with his mother and stepfather—to Lawrence, Kansas; Lincoln, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio. He spent two high school summers with his father in Mexico City, where he lowered a loaded gun he aimed at his own head because didn’t want to “
miss something”—such as the “top of a volcano” or local bullfights, which he later discovered “
must be smelt” for their “dust and tobacco and animals and leather.” Hughes survived to miss very little: he smelled, tasted, drank, and devoured the 1920s scene.

When he first arrived in Harlem, he wanted “
to shake hands” with
the “hundreds of colored people,” but
Columbia University, where he was racially shunned by his fellow students, was definitely “
not fun.” Having enrolled to please his father, he dropped out after a year. Working as a mess boy on a boat off Staten Island, he rebuffed an invitation from the famous
Alain Locke, who had read his poems and wanted to meet him; Hughes preferred the company of his fellow
Jack Tars. At twenty-one, pulling out on a boat bound for Africa, he cut himself loose from academia and his father by dumping all his books in the sea. In the years to come, his life was his own. Whether admiring his fellow crewmembers’ “
gaily mutinous state,” enduring hunger and racism in Paris, scorning the segregation within Washington’s black community, or losing the patronage of
Charlotte Osgood Mason for declaring he was not a “primitive,” Hughes stayed cheerful in the face of adversity and took inspiration from a defiant working class.

During his year bussing tables in
Washington, D.C., Hughes met Van Vechten and
Vachel Lindsay, both of whom supported his writing and facilitated his celebrated return to New York. Downtown, he frequented parties of influential whites:
Florine Stettheimer,
Alfred A. Knopf, and
Jack Baker (one of whose parties never took off because the black crowd was “
hunched over” his vast erotic library, “trying to find out what white folks say about love when they really come to the point”). He was right at home chez
Joel and Amy Spingarn and, naturally, chez
Carl Van Vechten, who, Hughes wrote, never spoke “
grandiloquently about democracy or Americanism” and never made “a fetish of those qualities” but rather “live[d] them with sincerity—and humor.” Uptown, Hughes attended anything and everything: the spectacular (but doomed) Cullen-DuBois wedding, the magnificent jazz funeral of
A’Lelia Walker (“very much like a party”), the sober and sophisticated parties at
Jessie Fauset’s, and all the “good-time gatherings” that he preferred—gumbo suppers at
James Weldon Johnson’s,
bohemian gatherings at
Wallace Thurman’s. He excoriated the
Cotton Club and its “
Jim Crow policy in the very heart of [Harlem’s] dark community”; like the majority of Harlemites, he hated the “vogue” of being black among the “influx of whites” who were “given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in the zoo.” But he
loved the “ball” to be had at Small’s Paradise and the “gaudy”
drag balls at the Hamilton and the Savoy. Above all, he loved
rent parties, where the hosts were usually anonymous and which were “
more amusing than any night club.”