BLACK
LITERATURE
continued from page 9
with Negro characters as stupid clowns, who had
no problems that could not be solved by the
moral equivalent of a stick of red peppermint
candy or a pint of red whisky. Charles Chesnutt
(1858-1932, the first black novelist of unques
tioned talent, while drawing comparisons be
tween whites, near-whites and Negroes gen
erally to the disadvantage of the latter, advises
whites that "Surely it were better to try some
other weapon than scorn and contumely and
hard words upon a people of our common race
- the human race ... for we are all children of
a common Father, forget it as we may, and each
one of us is . . . his brother's keeper. And Paul L.
Dunbar (1872-1906), probably the chief (black)
architect of Jhe minstrel tradition, who wrote
most of his poetry in dialect and an subjects
which permitted him to display his "finely ironic;
perceptions of the Negro's limitations", was
moved to protest that the white audience
neglected his poems in standard F.nglish, but
lavished praise upon his "jingle(s) in a broken
tongue."
By the? turn of the century, the minstrel tra
dition in American literature seemed indestructi
ble. So long as they worked in it, black writers
could count on the white audience's approval
of their "coon songs", "nigger dialect" and the
ridiculous situations set forth in "darky stories"
not only as great entertainment, but as proof
of Negro inferiority. And Negro inferiority ex
plained the Negro's inferior status in the social
order.
It is no wonder, then, that The Souls of Black
Folk (1903) was adversely criticized by white
Southerners. A review that appeared as editorial
comment in the Nashville Bonner was typical:
"This hook is dangerous for the negro to read,
for it will only excite discontent and fill his
imagination with things that do not exist, or
things that should not bear upon his mind." The
things that should not bear upon the Negro's
mind were, in summary, civil rights, the concept
of race pride, and a belief in human equity.
The Souh of Block Folk, by William K. B.
Dubois (1868-1963), helped to determine the
emotional tone, anticipated the direction of
thought, and suggested some of the themes that
would occupy most black American writers for a
half a century. The tone was once again
protest; the ideological direction was toward
interracial cooperation and integration; the
themes were the defiant assertion of black hu
manity and human equality. And all these would
find expression not only in literature, but in
social and political action that started in the
period of the first World War and has never
stopped. Hut that is another story.
Pfthffl 'ill;:;
Give the Generous Taste
of Johnnie W&lker Red.
'Tis the season for sharing
Scotch at its smooth and
satisfying best . . . uniquely
rich and mellow, consistent
in quality throughout the
world. That's the generous
taste of Johnnie Walker
Red. A holiday tradition
enjoyed since 1820.
Eniovment
you can always
count on.
IP,;
6
Blended Scotch Whisky. 86.8 Proof. 1975 Somerset Importers, Ltd., N.Y., N.Y.
. 1 ' II
Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, a foremost American
scholar and dean of black persons of letters.
A few talented black writers mostly poets
did not permit Dubois to influence their work.
William S. liraithwaite, Ann Spencer, Alice Dun
bar Nelson and (in his strange middle period and
in mid career) James Weldon Johnson preferred
to think of themselves simply at literary artists
whose aim was simply to meet the standards of
"universality" in subject matter, craftsmanship
and form. So they composed their "raceless"
poems on death and dreams and love and nature
and home, and published them in such literary
magazines as the Century. Outlook, the Atlantic
Monthly, the Boolunun. and the Literary Digest.
Nor did all the black writers for whom race
consciousness was the emotional matrix, the psy
chological touchstone, and the final lest of per
ception and insight have the same kind and qual
ity of talent though those with the brightest
gifts were both novelists and poets. Jean Toomer
(1894-1967) was a black writer only briefly. His
book, Cone (1923), structures poems, stories,
prose sketches and a "fabliau" into a work of
superb literary art which the author called a
novel. In Bun0 (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933).
Claude McKey failed to match Home to Harlem,
his first novel, for honesty of treatment and char
acter portrayal, and after Murlem Shadows (1922),
the first volume of his poetry to be published in
America, the vibrant" emotional intensity of his
protest poems fell away. Countee Cullen (1903
1940) was a fine lyric poet, whose black poems
are often striking statements on the black alien-ami-exile
theme, hut whose novel, One Wuy to
fleuven (1932), is just barely worthy of critical
attention. Of all the black writers of the period
commonly designated the Harlem Renaissance,
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was far and away
the most talented, versatile, innovative and pro
lific. He wrote poems, short stories, novels, plays,
sketches, essays, a social history and a two vol
ume autobiography.
Immediately following the first World War,
Rollin Harte, a white journalist, reflecting on
what Congressman James F. Byrnes of South
Carolina defined as the Negroes' "ill-governed
reaction toward race-rioting" and the "incendiary
utterances of would-be Negro leaders, circulated
through Negro newspapers in New York, Boston
and Chicago ..." reflecting on this and related
matters, Harte wrote: "Here is the same spirit
the spirit,, that is. of the now Negro. Hit, he hits
back. In a succession of race riots, he has proved
it. . . . That huge, leaderless exodus out of the
rural South to the urban North . . , meant for the
first time in his history the Negro had taken af
fairs into his own hands. Until then, things had
been done to the Negro, with the Negro, and for
the Negro ... At last he showed initiative and
self-reliance." And this "new" Negro engaged
the attention of gravely concerned whites, who
turned to sociologists, psychologists and human
ists for answers to the "race problem." Studies
of Negroes by whites poured from the presses
in the 1920's: The Negro in American Life, The
Negro Faces America, The Negro Problem in
Cities, The Negro Newspaper in the U.S. Black
writing of both the scholarly and imaginative
kind was carefully (and critically) examined for
the insights it offered into the "new" Negro mind
and the clues it might yield to the Negroes' be
havior. Reviews of black books regularly ap
peared in the book sections of metropolitan news
papers and in magazines of the caliber of the
North American Review, Scribner's, Harper's, the
Atlantic Monthly, and the American Mercury.
But something was happening on another level
too. In revolt against Main Street provincialism
and Mrs. Crundy's phony standards, whites
flocked to the Srtuthside, to Paradise Valley, to
Roxbury, to Harlem, where, it was generally be
lieved, social and moral restraints need be exer
cised only minimally among a people whose cur
rent imaginative literature celebrated the primi
tive and instinctual and the authority of feeling
over thought. And not only their literature, their
music, their dances; life itself.
Negroes quickly became in the 1920 s the
subject of imaginative treatment by whites. Eu
gene O'Neill's The F.mperor Jones was produced
in 1921. Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, a
novel of Harlem life, was the runaway best seller
in 1926, and the next year Paul Green's In Abra
ham's Bosom won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, DuBose Hey
ward among others wrote novels of Negro
life. Paul Whiteman made the distinctive Negro
music, jazz, famous in concert halls throughout
the U.S. And, employing another distinctively
black musical mode, George Gershwin composed
Rhapsody in Blue. In 1930, Green Pastures, a
Negro musical play written and composed by
whites, opened on Broadway. When it closed five
years later, America was in the depths of a grave
economic and social crisis.
The Great Depression had a profound effect
upon American life and thought. It impelled a
turn to the left, promoted ruthless introspection,
revolutionary honesty, and the affirmation of cer
tain positive values as set forth, say, in the plays
of Clifford Odets and S. N. Behrman; the
novels of F.rskine Caldwell. James T. Farrell, John
Dos Passes, Krnest Hemingway and William
Faulkner; the criticism and social commentary of
Granville Hicks, Newton Aryin, Paul Rosenfeld
and Henry Mencken. In short though mislead
ingly simplistic the Great Depression generated
a new consciousness: and so far as black Ameri
cans were concerned, this new consciousness was
dramatized in the work of Richard Wright (1908
1900), beginning with Uncle Tom's Children
(193H), a collection of four novella dealing with
black and white in a Southern selling.
Although frankly revolutionary in its tone and
in ils theme of collective retaliatory violence,
Wright's novella did not prepare American read
ers for Native Son (1940), his first published nov
el. A powerful Marxist condemnation of Ameri
can society, its pitiless introspective realism out
raged the sensibilities even of many middle class
Negro readers, who disclaimed the author's per
ception of the American social reality.
Block Boy (1945), the last book he wrote in the
U.S., is an autobiographical account of the. auth
or's first eighteen years. It tells nothing of his
life in Chicago, where he was wooed and won by
the Communist Party, worked on the Federal
Writer's Project, and was a friend of the sociolo
gist Horace Caylon and the poets Margaret Walk
er and Arna Bontemps. In 1937, Wright moved
to New York, where he also worked on the Fed
eral Writer's Project, wrote for the! communist
Daily Worker, and came to know Langston
Hughes, Countee Cullen and Ralph F.llison. He
lived in New York for ten years years, when,
married and a father, the tensions of a segregated
society were greater than he thought his wife and
child should be asked to-bear. Packing up his
young family, Wright moved permanently to
France. Over the next thirteen years, Wright
wrote eight books. Among these the novels, The
Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1945), and The
Long Dream (1958), show a sad falling off of
literary power and skill, an erosion of percep
tion, and a relaxation of those impulses that pro
duced his best work.
Nevertheless, those black writers both nov
elists and poets who came to wide attention
in the 1950 s and '60's, are indebted to Richard
Wright. They owe him a debt of definition, which
only James Baldwin denies. As Ralph F.llison, the
genius who wrote Invisible Man, points out in a
brilliant essay entitled "Richard Wright's Blues,"
Wright defines his black characters as human be
ings first and assumes "that the nucleus of plas-
continued on page 11