A southern white woman who is married to a black journalist says, in a critique entitled, Don'ts for My Daughter, that she would not "want her to read Home to Harlem, which overemphasizes the carnal side of the Aframerican." I will confess that I may fall short of that degree of civilization which perfects the lily-white state of mind of the gentle southern lady. And that was why as a creative writer I was unable to make nice distinctions between the carnal and the pure and happened perhaps to sin on the side of the carnal in Home to Harlem.
Yet I once read in a Negro magazine some stanzas entitled, Temptation, by a certain Young Southern White Lady, and attributed to my pure critic, which sound like a wild jazz page out of Nigger Heaven. I remember some of those stanzas:
I couldn't forget
The banjo's whang
And the piano's bang
As we strutted the do-do-do's
In Harlem!
That pansy seal
A-tossing me
All loose and free, O, lily me!
In muscled arms
Of Ebony!
I couldn't forget
That black boy's eyes
That black boy's shake
That black boy's size
I couldn't forget
O, snow white me!
Now to the mind of this black sinner this piece of sophisticated lily-white lyricism is more offensively carnal than the simple primitive erotic emotions of the characters of Home to Harlem. But I reiterate it is possible that I am not civilized white enough to appreciate the purity of the mind which composed the above stanzas and to which Home to Harlem is carnal.
The white lady is raising her mulatto daughter on a special diet and periodically the child is featured as a prodigy in the New York Herald Tribune. But it is possible that when that child has grown up out of the state of being a prodigy she might prefer a plain fare, including Home to Harlem. I have not had the time to be an experimentalist about life, because I have been occupied always with facing hard facts. And this I know to be a fact: Right here in New York there are children of mixed parentage, who have actually hated their white mother after they had grown up to understanding. When they came up against the full force of the great white city on the outside and went home to face a helpless white mother (a symbol of that white prejudice) it was more than their Negroid souls could stand.
I think it would be illuminating to know the real feelings of that white mother, who was doubtlessly devoted to her colored children.... I myself have had the experience of a fine friendship with a highly cultured white woman, when I first arrived in the United States—a friendship which was turned into a hideous nightmare because of the taboos of the dominant white community. I still retain a bitter memory of my black agony, but I can only try to imagine the white crucifixion of that cultured woman....
I do not think the author of Don'ts for My Daughter, felt personally antagonistic to me, when she wrote in the leading Negro magazine that she did not want her child to read my novel. It is possible that like myself she has faith in literary and artistic truth. Perhaps she even desires to contribute something to the growing literature of Negro life. I have read an interesting article by her on "America's Changing Color Line," which emphasizes the idea that America is steadily growing darker in complexion, and is informing about the increasing numbers of white Negroids who are absorbed by the white group.
Without the slightest feeling of antagonism to my critic, I would suggest to her that vicarious stories of "passing white" are merely of slight importance to the great group of fifteen millions who are obviously Negroes. I would suggest to her that if she really desires to make a unique contribution to American literature, she has a chance of doing something that no Negro can—something that might be worthwhile for her daughter to read: she might write a sincere account of what it means for an educated and sensitive white woman to be the wife of a Negro in America.
Gertrude Stein, the high priestess of artless-artful Art, identifies Negro with Nothingness. When the eternal faddists who exist like vampires on new phenomena become fed up with Negro art, they must find a reason for their indifference. From being disappointed in Paul Robeson, Gertrude Stein concludes that Negroes are suffering from nothingness. In the ineffable Stein manner she decided to take Paul Robeson as the representative of Negro culture. Similarly, any other faddist could arbitrarily make Chaliapin or Al Jolson or Maurice Chevalier or Greta Garbo the representative of Russian, Jewish, French and Swedish culture respectively. When Gertrude Stein finds that Paul Robeson knows American values and American life as only one in it and not of it could, when she discovers that he is big and naïve, but not quite naïve enough to please Gertrude Stein, she declares: "The African is not primitive; he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing can happen." Not long after she published this, something was happening: Negro Americans were rendering her opera Four Saints in Three Acts to sophisticated New York audiences.