The Negro in American fiction

by Sterling A. Brown

6. Compare the authors of folk-realism with the apologists of the preceding chapter.

CHAPTER IX

THE URBAN SCENE

The Harlem School.—Before 1925 there was little in American fiction about Negro life in northern cities. But when “the peasant moved cityward” in the great sweeps of migration, books about the urban Negro multiplied. The numbers of Negroes in northern cities grew by leaps and bounds from 1916 on. Although various cities beckoned—Pittsburgh with its steelmills, Chicago with its stockyards, Detroit with its automobile factories—it was Harlem that became the Mecca for the southern Negro, the West Indian, and the African. One historian of Harlem states that it contains more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth. Harlem became a Mecca likewise for white pleasure seekers from downtown and abroad, who, hunting the new thrill with the desperate eagerness of the post-war generation, rushed to what they considered a place of primitive abandon, of unfailing “joy of life.” Cabarets sprang up like mushrooms; putting on a big time became a major industry. In revolt against Victorian prudishness and repression, and machine-age standardization, writers and artists escaped to dark Harlem for vicarious joy, and discovered an “exotic, savage world,” only a nickel’s subway ride from the heart of an over-civilized city. The Harlem Boom was useful to Negro writers, who were influenced by the growing race-consciousness of the “greatest Negro city in the world.” Some accepted the downtown version of pagan Harlem as gospel, others put in disclaimers, but all made eager contact with the literary world.

Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1925) was the first novel to exploit this newly discovered territory, and has remained the most influential. The author, already known for sophisticated fiction, was attracted by the high spirits and piquant contrasts of Harlem. Running through the descriptions of cabarets, wild parties, and sensational orgies is the story of Byron, an “intellectual” wastrel. He is loved by Mary, a girl superior to the fast set, but he cannot resist the wiles of Lasca, “a gorgeous brown Messalina of Seventh Avenue.” Byron’s character cracks under the strain of fast living. His last gesture is one of typical futility: in a fit of jealous and drunken rage, he empties his gun into the body of his rival, who was already dead, while the police approach.

Nigger Heaven presented a setting and type of life that were little known to American fiction except for The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man. The gin-mills and cabarets, the kept men and loose ladies of Harlem’s bohemian fringe, have surface accuracy and the appeal of the unfamiliar. Van Vechten in a short space of time observed closely. But like a discoverer, he was partial to exotic singularities. That these exist does not validate the claim of the publishers that “Herein is caught the fascination and tortured ecstasies of Harlem.... The author tells the story of modern Negro life.” Modern Negro life is not in Nigger Heaven; certain selected scenes to prove Negro primitivism are.

Claude McKay’s Home To Harlem (1926) has for its setting the speak-easies, buffet flats and “tonsorial parlors” of a pagan Harlem. The characters are longshoremen, dining car cooks and waiters, and members of sporting circles. Casual love affairs are their main pursuits. Jake, an ex-soldier, recently returned from the World War, meets and loses a marvelous brown charmer on his first night in Harlem. His picaresque adventures and those of his cronies take up the rest of the book, until he finds the long-lost beauty at the end. Working conditions on the railroad are described with some grimness, but Home To Harlem lacks McKay’s sharpest protest. McKay’s nearest approach to his poetry is in the ecstatic worship with which Jake looks upon the abandon of the gay Mecca.

McKay’s Banjo (1929) is related to the Harlem school of fiction, describing the life of stevedores, tramps, sailors and panhandlers in the “Ditch” at Marseilles. Ray, a vagabond intellectual from Home To Harlem, does much of the talking; savoring color, joy and beauty wherever he finds it, he is attracted to the primitive and violent longshoremen.

Educated Negroes ashamed of their race’s intuitive love of color ... ashamed of Congo-sounding laughter, ashamed of their complexion (bleaching out), ashamed of their strong appetites. No being ashamed for Ray. Rather than lose his soul, let intellect go to hell and live instinct!

To Ray, “A black man, even though educated, was in closer biological kinship to the swell of primitive earth life.” Anti-bourgeois and anti-imperialist, seeing the “civilized world” from the bottom, Ray is nevertheless a racialist, not a radical. And such, in Banjo, is the author’s position. He has been praised for dealing with the proletariat, but the beachcombers here can hardly be so considered. It is hard to see how reliance upon instinct will improve the lot of the submerged and the defeated.