Dark Surrender by Ronald Kirkbride (1933), after describing South Carolina plantation life in the manner of Julia Peterkin, delivers an attack upon the “New Negro.” Having deserted a wife on the plantation, who promptly becomes a Scarlet Sister Mary, Tom goes to the North, graduates from Harvard with athletic and scholastic honors, visits Europe, and becomes a great poet. But he gives it all up as “imitation of the accomplishments of the white man,” and returns to the soil. To the white owner of the plantation he states that Negroes
who have aspirations and yearn to be great ... are fools in the sense that they are not true negroes.... To live from day to day in simple enjoyment, with no cares nor worries, with no great attempts, to be something which you are not ... that is life, the true life.... The negro has his place in the present, in the simple life, with no desires but of the body, with no yearnings for the future nor for the past....
Maxwell Bodenheim, with a naturalist’s approach, could not see in Harlem only a place of joy-filled Negroes. In Naked On Roller Skates (1931) he shows the harsher, truculent aspects of Harlem dives. In Ninth Avenue (1926) he shows the seamy aspects of Manhattan. His white heroine in this book marries a Negro, a better man than any of the Ninth Avenue set. Contrary to O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings this intermarriage is not doomed to failure. In Deep River (1934) Clement Wood does not have the regret, disdain, or anxiety with which most southern novelists look upon Harlem and the “New Negro.” This chronicle of the marriage of a noted Negro singer to a white woman is frankly done, exploiting a subject generally taboo. But it is hardly worthy to stand alongside Wood’s earlier novel Nigger.
Summary. The fiction of urban realism was valuable for introducing new characters in a new milieu. Whether created by Negro or white authors, the characters are race-conscious, and at times militant. But the old stereotypes by no means disappeared. Carl Van Vechten has a noted magazine editor comment on the possibilities of Negro literature:
Nobody has yet written a good gambling story; nobody has gone into the curious subject of the divers tribes of the region.... Nobody has ever done the Negro servant-girl, who refuses to live in. Washing dishes in the day-time, she returns at night to Harlem where she smacks her daddy in the jaw or else dances and makes love. On the whole I should say she has the best time of any domestic servant in the world.... The Negro fast set does everything the Long Island fast set does ... but it is vastly more amusing ... for the simple reason that it is amused.
Most authors took this to heart. What resulted was a search for the exotic and an insistence that Negroes were peculiarly marked by a “joy of living.” Dance-halls, rent-parties, gambling, sprees, casual love-affairs crowded out more serious realism. The cabin was exchanged for the cabaret, but Negroes were still described as “creatures of joy.” Even Negro propagandists urged this, seeking to find some superior “racial gift.” To look for the true life of a Negro community in cabarets, most often run by white managers for white thrill-seekers, is like looking for the truth about slavery in the off-time banjo-plunking and capers before the big house. Focusing upon carefree abandon, the Harlem school, like the plantation tradition, neglected the servitude. Except for brief glimpses, the drama of the workaday life, the struggles, the conflicts, are missing. And such definite features of Harlem as the lines of the unemployed, the overcrowded schools, the delinquent children headed straight to petty crime, the surly resentment—all of these seeds that bore such bitter fruit in the Harlem riot—are conspicuously absent.
Bourgeois realists did “apprise white humanity of the better classes among Negro humanity,” but this is a value apart from the values of fiction. Their upper-class characters too often seem to serve as window-display. “Passing for white” is made a much more acute and frequent problem that it is in ordinary Negro middle class experience. With discerning satire, Martha Gruening sums up the argument of Negro bourgeois realism:
I am writing this book because most white people still believe that all Colored People are cooks called Mandy or Pullman porters called George—but they aren’t. They think we all live in cotton field cabins or in city slums, but actually some of us live on Edgecomb Avenue or Chestnut Street. We don’t all shout at Camp Meeting or even all belong to the Baptist or Methodist church. Some of us are Episcopalians. If you were privileged to visit our homes (which you aren’t, for we are just as exclusive as you are) you would find bathtubs, sets of the best authors and etchings! That’s how refined we are. We have class distinctions, too.... The daughters of our upper classes are beautiful and virtuous and look like illustrations in Vogue ... far more attractive than white girls of the same class, for they come in assorted shades.... Joy isn’t on your side of the line, nor song, nor laughter.
There is certainly place in American fiction for treatment of the Negro middle-class. The precarious situation of this small group could well attract a realist of vision, not only to satirize its pretense, but also to record its dogged struggling. But to approve it in proportion to its resembling white middle-class life, is not the way of important realism.
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