Niggers on the docks, niggers in the city streets, niggers laughing. A slow dance is going on.... A brown woman having thirteen children—a different man for every child—going to church too, singing, dancing, broad shoulders, broad hips, soft eyes, a soft laughing voice.... Negroes singing had sometimes a way of getting at the ultimate truth of things.
This chorus of happy sensualists mocking repressed whites may explain “ultimate truth” to Anderson, but a great deal of truth about their lives escapes his penetrating interest. Harassed by Puritanism and industrialism, Anderson has found elements that bring him peace, rather than interpretation of a people.
Waldo Frank looks upon Holiday (1923) as his story of “one of the greatest of American dramas—the struggle in the South between the white race and the black ... each of which ... needs what the other possesses.” Like his fellow mystic Anderson, Frank sees Niggertown to be full of warm song and happy, ironic laughter, free from the strain of money-making, repressed White-town. But he likewise sees insult, exploitation and struggle. “Chokin’ is de black man’s life,” says one old woman, who knows the South too well. The passive cruelty of White Nazareth is introduced when a Negro deckhand drowns and no one makes an effort to save him. We see the active cruelty when John Cloud, ambitious and manly young Negro, and Virginia, “weary of her whiteness,” of being incessantly sheltered, step out from the pattern. In a spell of drought and revivals, John and Virginia meet by accident in the woods above Nazareth. Though “boss-girl” and “servant-man,” they have been drawn from mutual respect into desire. When Virginia returns to Nazareth, the meeting is misunderstood, and the men, already whipped up by religious hysteria, quickly form a mob. Shocked from her dream of escape, Virginia sinks back into southern conventionality and half-remorseful inertia, and does not speak. At dusk, John is burned in the Square of Nazareth.
Frank sees that White-town, assuring itself that the “nigger will stay in his place,” is still forever suspicious of “the muttering, the stirring.” More boldly than others, Frank reveals what he considers the deepest cause of much of the fear:
‘Good mo’nin ... I have been walkin’ by yo’ side all of this street. An’ yo’ didn’t see me.’ He gives these words with a prophetic dryness. John feels the ominous threat.... ‘I’ve watched you, nigger,’ they say, ‘I’ve watched you lookin’ at my daughter. How dare you look at my daughter? Nigger, that look in yo’ eyes means murder in our land. How dare you nigger, look so hard at my daughter that you forget to salute the white man at yo’ side?’
When Virginia, who knows how free her brother is with Negro women, laughs at the “fanatical obsessions” of her men-folk, she adds flame to the tinder. Symbolic and difficult, Holiday is still a true, powerful and different version of race relations in the South. In The Death and Birth of David Markand (1933), however, the brief treatment of the Negro falls below the penetration of Holiday.
Deriving in part from Anderson and Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) has much greater intimacy with Negro life, dealing equally well with the black belt of Georgia and bourgeois Washington. Toomer is master of fluid, evocative prose; some of his stories are prose-poems.
The sun is hammered to a band of gold. Pine-needles, like mazda, are brilliantly aglow. No rain has come to take the rustle from the falling sweet-gum leaves. Over in the forest, across the swamp, a sawmill blows its closing whistle. Smoke curls up.... Curls up and spreads itself pine-high above the branch, a single silver band along the eastern valley. A black boy ... you are the most sleepiest man I ever seed, Sleeping Beauty ... cradled on a gray mule, guided by the hollow sound of cowbells, heads for them through a rusty cotton field.
His faithfully portrayed Georgia landscape Toomer has peopled with faithfully drawn characters, such as Fern, the shiftless, ignorant beauty of the Georgia Pike, and Becky, a white outcast, who bears two Negro children. “Blood Burning Moon” tells of the rivalry between a Negro and a white man for a Negro girl, that ends in a murder and a lynching. Not propaganda in the manner of the apologists, it is tragic realism at its best.
Neither debunking Negro society nor glorifying it, Toomer pictures Washington with the thoroughness of one who knew it from the inside. The futile, and in the story of “Avey,” the drably tragic revolt against the smugness of a rising middle-class, are brilliantly set before us. Toomer was sharply criticized by Negroes for his “betrayal”; his insight and tenderness seemed to escape them. “Kabnis” is a long, occasionally obscure story of a northern Negro teaching school in Georgia. No one has done so well as Toomer the hypocritical school principal, a petty, puritanical tyrant who truckles to the whites. Laymon, a preacher-teacher who “knows more than would be good for anyone other than a silent man”; Halsey, a self-assured, courageous artisan; and Kabnis, a weakling idealist driven to cynicism and dissipation until he discovers, mystically, the strength of his people, are similarly well drawn. Toomer reveals in “Kabnis” an insight that makes his failure to write a novel about Negro life one of the undoubted losses of contemporary literature.