We have thus seen that the mulatto who “passes” has been a victim of opposing interpretations. Negro novelists urge his unhappiness, until he is summoned back to his people by the spirituals, or their full-throated laughter, or their simple sweet ways. One of Wallace Thurman’s characters says:
My dear, you’ve been reading novels. Thousands of Negroes cross the line and I assure you that few, if any, feel that fictional urge to rejoin their own kind.... Negroes who can and do pass are so glad to get away they probably join the K.K.K. to uphold white supremacy.
But this is heresy: a mystical bond must be shown, the cutting of which produces grief, since the white world is “pallid and to be pitied.”
White novelists insist upon the mulatto’s unhappiness for other reasons. To them he is the anguished victim of a divided inheritance. Mathematically they work it out that his intellectual strivings and self-control come from his white blood, and his emotional urgings, indolence and potential savagery come from his Negro blood. Their favorite character, the octoroon, wretched because of the “single drop of midnight in her veins,” desires a white lover above all else, and must therefore go down to a tragic end. The white version is nearly a century old; the Negro version sprang up recently. Both are examples of race flattery. Divided between conflicting attitudes, the poor mulatto finds added unhappiness in his interpreters.
In Opposition. But the idealism seen in the apologistic, the bourgeois, and the “passing” novels found a gleeful critic in George Schuyler, of the H. L. Mencken school of satirists. Black No More (1931) tells how Dr. Crookman discovers a drug that will turn Negroes white. Negroes rush to use it, even the chauvinists who had preached pride of race. Schuyler lampoons both sides, the professional “race-men” who were tremendous gainers from the “problem,” and the spokesman of the Knights of Nordica who, though totally ignorant, discussed over the radio “anthropology, psychology, miscegenation, cooperation with Christ, getting right with God, and curbing Bolshevism....” Telling blows are landed on statisticians, rhetorical windbags, pretentious strivers and hat-in-hand Negroes, but Black No More is farce rather than satire, in the last analysis—provoking more mirth than thought. It was, however, refreshingly different. Slaves Today (1932) is an attack upon the mistreatment of the natives in Liberia by the upper-class Americo-Liberians. Schuyler’s narrative sketches in such magazines as The American Mercury are told with terseness and point.
Wallace Thurman is likewise the “devil’s advocate” in his two novels. Emma Lou in The Blacker The Berry (1929) is another defeated heroine, not because she is an octoroon, however, but for precisely the opposite reason. Well-educated, she is unable to get suitable positions and social life because she is black. She goes around for a time with the “New Negro intellectuals,” but is ill at ease with them. Scorned and rejected, she sinks deeper and deeper into drabness. Thurman thus puts his finger upon one of the sorest points of the Negro bourgeoisie, its color snobbishness, “its blue vein circle,” “aspiring to be whiter and whiter every generation.” His descriptions of Harlem rent parties and the like are of Van Vechten’s school, but the theme of his novel deserves attention. Unfortunately the writing is slipshod, and the steady decline of his central character is less tragic than depressing. His heroine is as morbidly sensitive about color as any tragic octoroon, and shows as little fight.
The Infants of The Spring (1932) shows Thurman taking less seriously his coterie of Harlem artists. Young in years and achievement, they flatter themselves as “a lost generation,” and like Van Vechten’s Byron, seek escape in dissipation. One cynical character speaks:
Being a Negro writer in these days is a racket and I’m going to make the most of it while it lasts. I find queer places for whites to go in Harlem ... out-of-the-way primitive churches, side street speakeasies and they fall for it. About twice a year I manage to sell a story.... I am a genius in the making. Thank God for this Negro Literary Renaissance! Long may it flourish!
Debunking the Bohemian futility of the intellectuals, Thurman is just as severe on the bourgeois idealists and the various race-messiahs. Infants of The Spring is at times peevish, at times angry, crudely written, and not always well thought out. But like Thurman’s first novel, it had something to say.
Black Sadie (1928) by T. Bowyer Campbell is an irritated southerner’s attempt to debunk the Harlem that lured jaded Bohemians. From “corn-field nigger” Sadie rises to be model for the New Negro exaltation of Africa victrix, and the toast of artistic New York. Even in her affluence, however, Sadie is a kleptomaniac. After causing a murder, she returns to happy Virginia. “Easy come, easy go, niggers” are Campbell’s closing words. Campbell’s satire has point, but he is too vexed to get it across. It is obvious, also, that the stereotype he prefers is that of the comic menial.