The Harlem stories in Gingertown (1932) return us to blues singers, “sweet backs,” entertainers, longshoremen, railroad men, barbers, chambermaids, bellhops, waiters and beautiful “brownskins.” All of these are called by McKay the “joy-lovers” of the belt, but their stories do not reveal great joy. In “Brownskin Blues” and “Mattie and Her Sweetman” McKay bitterly scores color prejudice among Negroes themselves; in “Highball” he scores prejudice among the whites. “Near-White” tells conventionally of the unhappy “passer.” In “Truant,” a dining car waiter, married to a social climber, throws up his menial job like a Sherwood Anderson hero. The stories are done with unabashed realism, but they do not cover a wide range.
McKay’s stories of his native Jamaica in Gingertown and his third novel Banana Bottom (1933), though realistic, have a pastoral quality. A setting and way of life are skillfully and affectionately conveyed in both books and we are spared preachments on “the problem.” In Banana Bottom especially, character development is uppermost. The story of Bita Plant, educated in England, is simple and winning. Minor characters like Squire Gensir, Jubban, Anty Nommy and Crazy Bow are memorable, not idealized, but emerging with dignity and warm flesh-and-blood humanity.
Although these are perhaps McKay’s best fiction, the greater part of his work deals with American Negroes, particularly in Harlem. McKay has denied that he was influenced by Van Vechten, stating that Home To Harlem was about completed before Nigger Heaven was published. There are points of agreement, however; McKay, like Van Vechten, believes in “the inexpressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race,” and therefore seeks in the main the colorful aspects of “the joy-belt.” There are differences as well. Having worked as dining car waiter, porter and longshoreman, McKay knew the unskilled Negro worker at first hand, not from an outside view. “I created my Negro characters without sandpaper and varnish.” Because of this, his people are not the quaint, artless innocents endeared to so many authors and readers. They live hard lives, and are consequently hardened: they may be ignorant, but they are not naïve. In dealing with the urban worker, McKay opened a new field. But the Harlem he portrayed still seems too close to the Harlem of a popular literary fashion. And the “inner lives” he knows so well have not yet been shown with the depth of understanding that one might expect of Claude McKay.
Rudolph Fisher portrays Harlem with a jaunty realism. The Walls of Jericho deals with types as different as piano-movers and “race-leaders.” The antics of Jinx and Bubber are first-rate slapstick, and though traces of Octavus Roy Cohen appear, most of the comedy is close to Harlem side-walks. Fisher is likewise master of irony. Miss Cramp, the philanthropist, who believes that mulattoes are the result of the American climate, is caricatured, but the picture of the Annual Costume Ball of the G.I.A. (General Improvement Association) is rich comedy of manners. He deftly ridicules the thrill-seekers from downtown who find everything in Harlem “simply marvelous.” Satiric toward professional uplifters, The Walls of Jericho still has the New Negro militancy. Merrit is an embittered “New Negro”; he believes that the Negro should let the Nordic do the serious things, and spend his time in “tropic nonchalance, developing nothing but his capacity for enjoyment,” and then take complete possession through force of numbers. Fisher likewise shows the spirit of racial unity between the “dicties” and the masses—“Fays don’ see no difference ’tween dickty shines and any other kind o’ shines. One jig in danger is ev’y jig in danger.” It is significant, however, that the wrecking of a Negro’s house in a white neighborhood is the work of a disgruntled Negro, the villain of the book.
But Fisher was less interested in the “problem” than in the life and language of Harlem’s poolrooms, cafes, and barber shops. The Conjure Man Dies (1932), the first detective novel by a Negro, brings Jinx and Bubber back to the scene to help solve one of Harlem’s grisliest murders. A high-brow detective, an efficient Negro police sergeant and an erudite doctor of voodoo are interesting new characters. The novel is above the average in its popular field and was followed by a Harlem tenement murder mystery solved by the same detective.
Before his untimely death, Fisher became one of the best short story writers of the New Negro movement. “The City of Refuge,” containing a good description of the southern migrant’s happy amazement at Harlem, and “Blades of Steel” are first-rate local color of the barber shops, dance-halls and cafes. “Vestiges” and “Miss Cynthie,” for all of their light touch, have an unusual tenderness and fidelity to middle class experience. Fisher was an observer with a quick eye and a keen ear, and a witty commentator. At times his plots are too neat, with something of O. Henry’s trickery. His Harlem is less bitter than McKay’s, but it exists; and his realism, as far as it goes, is as definite as that of any of the numerous writers who took Harlem for their province.
In Countee Cullen’s One Way To Heaven (1932), Sam Lucas, a one-armed gambler and vagabond, practices a racket around the churches, pretending to be saved at revivals and thereby collecting money. His testimony in a Harlem church converts Mattie, who falls in love with him. Alternately vicious and sentimental, Sam makes Mattie’s life miserable until his pretended death-bed vision of salvation brings happiness to the religious girl. Mattie’s working for Constancia Brown, an upper-class Negro, serves as an excuse to bring in the artistic-bohemian Harlem. Cullen’s pictures of this set are almost cartoons. He lampoons the back-to-Africa movement, the philistines who form Book-Lovers’ Societies, the public reciters and the extreme New Negro racialists. But Constancia, who refuses to “pass,” speaks the New Negro creed:
Enjoyment isn’t across the line. Money is there, and privilege, and the sort of power which comes with numbers but as for enjoyment, they don’t know what it is.... I have seen two Negroes turn more than one dull party, where I was longing for home and Harlem, into a revel which Puck himself would find it hard to duplicate.
The best part of the novel is the portrayal of the Negro church. This is fresher material, presented with understanding.
Purpose Novels. More realistic than his earlier fiction, Dark Princess (1928) by W. E. B. DuBois, is still part fantasy, and part mordant social criticism. As editor of the Crisis, DuBois had urged a union of the darker races of the world. Dark Princess is an allegory driving home the same message. In its last chapter Matthew Towns, the Negro hero, flies to his homeplace in rural Virginia where his wife, Kautilya, Her Royal Highness of Bwodpur, India, has just given birth to a son, Matthew or Madhu. The son is acclaimed “King of the Snows of Gaurisaukar, Grand Mughal of Utter India, Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds!” Kautilya explains: