Fire!!

by Unknown

Fire Burns

A Department of Comment

Some time ago, while reviewing Carl Van Vechten’s lava laned Nigger Heaven I made the prophecy 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.

So far my prophecy has failed to pan out, and superficially it seems as if it never will, for instead of being enshrined for his pseudo-sophisticated, semi-serious, semi-ludicrous effusion about Harlem, Mr. Van Vechten is about to be lynched, at least in effigy.

Yet I am loathe to retract or to temper my first prophecy. Human nature is too perverse and prophecies do not necessarily have to be fulfilled within a generation. Rather, they can either be fulfilled or else belied with startling two-facedness throughout a series of generations, which, of course, creates the possibility that the fulfillments may outnumber the beliements and thus gain credence for the prophecy with posterity. Witness the Bible.

However, in defending my prophecy I do not wish to endow Mr. Van Vechten’s novel (?) with immortality, but there is no real reason why Nigger Heaven should not eventually be as stupidly acclaimed as it is now being stupidly damned by the majority of Harlem’s dark inhabitants. Thus I defiantly reiterate that a few years hence Mr. Van Vechten will be spoken of as a kindly gent rather than as a moral leper exploiting people who had believed him to be a sincere friend.

I for one, and strange as it may sound, there are others, who believe that Carl Van Vechten was rendered sincere during his explorations and observations of Negro life in Harlem, even if he remained characteristically superficial. Superficiality does not necessarily denote a lack of sincerity, and even superficiality may occasionally delve into deep pots of raw life. What matter if they be flesh pots?

In writing Nigger Heaven the author wavered between sentimentality and sophistication. That the sentimentality won out is his funeral. That the sophistication stung certain Negroes to the quick is their funeral.

The odds are about even. Harlem cabarets have received another public boost and are wearing out cash register keys, and entertainers’ throats and orchestra instruments. The so-called intelligentsia of Harlem has exposed its inherent stupidity. And Nigger Heaven is a best seller.

Group criticism of current writings, morals, life, politics, or religion is always ridiculous, but what could be more ridiculous than the wholesale condemnation of a book which only one-tenth of the condemnators have or will read. And even if the book was as vile, as degrading, and as defamatory to the character of the Harlem Negro as the Harlem Negro now declares, his criticisms would not be considered valid by an intelligent person as long as the critic had had no reading contact with the book.

The objectors to Nigger Heaven claim that the author came to Harlem, ingratiated himself with Harlem folk, and then with a supercilious grin and a salacious smirk, lolled at his desk downtown and dashed off a pornographic document about uptown in which all of the Negro characters are pictured as being debased, lecherous creatures not at all characteristic or true to type, and that, moreover, the author provokes the impression that all of Harlem’s inhabitants are cabaret hounds and thirsty neurotics. He did not tell, say his critics, of our well bred, well behaved church-going majorities, nor of our night schools filled with eager elders, nor of our brilliant college youth being trained in the approved contemporary manner, nor of our quiet, home loving thousands who hardly know what the word cabaret connotes. He told only of lurid night life and of uninhibited sybarites. Therefore, since he has done these things and neglected to do these others the white people who read the book will believe that all Harlem Negroes are like the Byrons, the Lascas, the Pettijohns, the Rubys, the Creepers, the Bonifaces, and the other lewd hussies and whoremongers in the book.

It is obvious that these excited folk do not realize that any white person who would believe such poppy-cock probably believes it anyway, without any additional aid from Mr. Van Vechten, and should such a person read a tale anent our non-cabareting, church-going Negroes, presented in all their virtue and glory and with their human traits, their human hypocrisy and their human perversities glossed over, written, say, by Jessie Fauset, said person would laugh derisively and allege that Miss Fauset had not told the truth, the same as Harlem Negroes are alleging that Carl Van Vechten has not told the truth. It really makes no difference to the race’s welfare what such ignoramuses think, and it would seem that any author preparing to write about Negroes in Harlem or anywhere else (for I hear that DuBose Heyward has been roundly denounced by Charlestonian Negroes for his beautiful Porgy) should take whatever phases of their life that seem the most interesting to him, and develop them as he pleases. Why Negroes imagine that any writer is going to write what Negroes think he ought to write about them is too ridiculous to merit consideration. It would seem that they would shy away from being pigeon-holed so long have they been the rather lamentable victims of such a typically American practice, yet Negroes would have all Negroes appearing in contemporary literature made as ridiculous and as false to type as the older school of pseudo-humorous, sentimental white writers made their Uncle Toms, they Topsys, and their Mammies, or as the Octavius Roy Cohen school now make their more modern “cullud” folk.

One young lady, prominent in Harlem collegiate circles, spoke forth in a public forum (oh yes, they even have public forums where they spend their time announcing that they have not read the book, and that the author is a moral leper who also commits literary sins), that there was only one character in Nigger Heaven who was true to type. This character, the unwitting damsel went on, was Mary Love. It seems as if all the younger Negro women in Harlem are prototypes of this Mary Love, and it is pure, poor, virtuous, vapid Mary, to whom they point as a typical life model.

Again there has been no realization that Mary Love is the least life-like character in the book, or that it is she who suffers most from her creator’s newly acquired seriousness and sentimentality, she who suffers most of the whole ensemble because her creator discovered, in his talented trippings around Manhattan, drama at which he could not chuckle the while his cavalier pen sped cleverly on in the same old way yet did not—could not spank.

But—had all the other characters in Nigger Heaven approximated Mary’s standard, the statue to Carl Van Vechten would be an actualized instead of a deferred possibility, and my prophecy would be gloriously fulfilled instead of being ignominiously belied.

Wallace Thurman.

Printed by JOSEPH LEVENTHAL, New York City

OPPORTUNITY

Journal of Negro Life

“On behalf of my publishers, I ask your formal permission to reprint the following story in The Best Short Stories of 1926: ‘Symphonesque,’ by Arthur Huff Fauset. Opportunity, June 1926.”

Edward J. O’Brien, London, England
Editor, Best Short Stories

“The brilliant Negro journal, Opportunity.”

Du Bose Heyward, Author of Porgy

“This latest number of Opportunity is fine. Don’t forget me on those back numbers.”

Carl Sandburg, Poet,
Author, Chicago Poems, Smoke and Steel,
and Abraham Lincoln

“You are now giving us the best magazine we have.”

Benjamin Brawley

“We have decided to give to last year’s class a subscription to some good Negro Magazine. The class voted unanimously for the Opportunity Magazine.”

C. H. Harper, Dean,
Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial
State College, Nashville, Tenn.

OPPORTUNITY

Is Published By

The National Urban League
127 East 23rd St., New York City

ERIC WALROND
Business Manager
CHARLES S. JOHNSON
Editor
COUNTEE P. CULLEN
Assistant Editor

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Spelling has been retained as published.

In the play, [Color Struck], the surname for the character of Emma has been spelled three different ways. These have also been retained.

The following printer errors have been changed.

CHANGED		FROM		TO
Page [7]:		“They are exits”		“There are exits”
Page [7]:		“shreiks, strumming of”		“shrieks, strumming of”
Page [7]:		“twdry best of 1900”		“tawdry best of 1900”
Page [7]:		“litle friendly pushing”		“little friendly pushing”
Page [7]:		“With head insite”		“With head inside”
Page [8]:		“accordian, the other”		“accordion, the other”
Page [9]:		“I don’t want to be”		“I don’t want you to be”
Page [9]:		“stretched and a”		“stretched on a”
Page [9]:		“by twos and three”		“by twos and threes”
Page [10]:		“A guitar, accordian”		“A guitar, accordion”
Page [11]:		“You won’t go it”		“You won’t go in”
Page [11]:		“mandolin, banjo, accordian”		“mandolin, banjo, accordion”
Page [12]:		“did you say John”		“Did you say John”
Page [16]:		“Countée Cullen”		“Countee Cullen”
Page [25]:		“on his seige against”		“on his siege against”
Page [27]:		“wont of most bridgegrooms”		“wont of most bridegrooms”
Page [33]:		“things he remebered”		“things he remembered”
Page [34]:		“psuedo grandeur”		“pseudo grandeur”
Page [36]:		“sound of castenets”		“sound of castanets”
Page [36]:		“heels clicking rythmically”		“heels clicking rhythmically”
Page [37]:		“black poppes and red”		“black poppies and red”
Page [37]:		“a lilly ... a red lilly”		“a lily ... a red lily”
Page [37]:		“exhultant ... and in his”		“exultant ... and in his”
Page [42]:		“Dey thows ’em away”		“Dey throws ’em away”
Page [42]:		“done got to biggety”		“done got too biggety”
Page [42]:		“two botles uh strawberry”		“two bottles uh strawberry”
Page [43]:		“At hates yuh lak”		“Ah hates yuh lak”
Page [44]:		“kin run thew whut”		“kin run threw whut”
Page [44]:		“he spring back toward”		“she spring back toward”
Page [45]:		“and is one open eye”		“and his one open eye”
Page [45]:		“Zona Neale Hurston.”		“Zora Neale Hurston.”
Page [48]:		“their time anouncing”		“their time announcing”
Page [48]:		“life-life character in”		“life-like character in”

All other inconsistencies are as in the original.