by Yuval Taylor
Zora claimed, in Mules and Men, that the Negro storyteller is “lacking in bitterness . . . in circumstances that ordinarily would call for pity.” This observation challenged that of Sterling A. Brown, who had taught in the South. He disapproved of Mules and Men for leaving out the anger and hostility so characteristic of the black men and women he knew there. He ended his review of the book by noting that Zora’s characters were “naive, quaint, complaisant, bad enough to kill each other in jooks, but meek otherwise, socially unconscious.” He mentioned the ills that the people she wrote about faced daily—disease, poverty, filth, violence, lack of education, and the exploitation of their labor. To write about them as if they harbored no resentment seemed false to Brown. He cited his own experience: “These people brood upon their hardships, talk about them ‘down by the big-gate,’ and some times even at the big house. . . . Mules and Men should be more bitter; it would be nearer the total truth.” This vein of criticism would be echoed by many of the black writers who encountered Zora’s work during her lifetime.
Zora argued that in black folklore “there are no bitter tragic tales at all. When Old Massa won, the thing ended up in a laugh just the same.” She could have added that the same is true of the blues. Zora would likely have agreed with Ralph Ellison when he wrote that “the blues are not primarily concerned with civil rights or obvious political protest; they are an art form and thus a transcendence of these conditions.”
Moreover, what Zora’s black critics failed to grasp was the reason behind Zora’s lifelong practice of minimizing the resentment of African Americans in her work. It was a simple one, really: “Bitterness,” as she put it in Dust Tracks on a Road, “is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.” Zora recognized that those who are bitter and resentful are seen by themselves and others as victims, and the very existence of victims justifies, in a real way, the acts of the victimizers. If you are intent on oppressing a people, you want and expect them to be bitter and resentful; if, instead, they react with good humor and heroism, taking matters into their own hands and ignoring your oppressive acts, you feel frustrated that those acts have failed to crush your intended victims. “I am in the struggle with the sword in my hands,” she wrote, “and I don’t intend to run until you run me. So why give off the smell of something dead under the house while I am still in there tussling with my sword in my hand?” Whether fools or sages, tricksters or saints, villains or heroes, her characters, by refusing to be victims and by asserting their complete independence from the white world, attained a freedom that the resentful and bitter characters of, say, Richard Wright were forever unable to attain. Having grown up in an all-black town, Zora wanted to show the world that an autonomous black community, led and organized by black people, had no need for bitterness or resentment. They already lived in a kind of utopia.
Zora took pains to explain her stance in a 1943 letter to Countee Cullen:
Why dont I put something about lynchings in my books? As if all the world did not know about Negroes being lynched! My stand is this: either we must do something about it that the white man will understand and respect, or shut up. No whiner ever got any respect or relief. If some of us must die for human justice, then let us die. . . . But my own self-respect refuses to let me go to the mourners bench. Our position is like a man sitting on a tack and crying that it hurts, when all he needs to do is get up off it. . . . I shall never join the cry-babies.
Besides, it was a lot more fun advancing than complaining. As Zora wrote in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” “The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.”
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Underlying Langston’s and Zora’s defiant views of black literary production was their belief in fundamental differences between the Negro and the Nordic, to use terms in contemporaneous use. This belief was widespread among both groups in the 1920s, and backed by many of the latest scientific theories. The idea of the racial superiority of whites was promoted by the likes of the racial anthropologist Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy) and the amateur historian Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race). Their highly influential beliefs in the threat of “inferior” races to American civilization had a tremendous impact, including the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which drastically curtailed immigration quotas. Arnold Rampersad has posited that most of the black writers of the 1920s “accepted the notion of black racial and cultural inferiority compared to the highest standards of European civilization.” But Zora and Langston turned this belief on its head, positing that the distinctive characteristics of black expression were in fact superior to those of the “Nordics.” They then used this belief to classify black people into two groups. One acted “white”; it included black political leaders, whom they roundly despised. The other was exemplified by “the poor Negro, the real one in the furrows and cane breaks,” as Zora put it.
Naturally, these theories of racial difference were countered by the work of other, more sage scientists, in particular her mentor Franz Boas. She had read and admired his work, in which he explained that perceived racial differences are the result of cultural rather than physical differences, in contrast to the prevailing idea that different cultures were at different stages of biological evolution; she was familiar with his studies of American Indians, which showed that their belief system was as sophisticated and complex as any other, and knew that he thought the same of African Americans. Yet she chose to ignore the conclusions in his 1911 masterwork The Mind of Primitive Man, where, as he later wrote, he argued that “there is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man. A close connection between race and personality has never been established.”
For the majority of Americans of the time, “primitive” societies, including African American, were characterized by a lack of impulse control and a short attention span, and governed more by emotion than by reason; Zora shared these ideas, as evidenced in her essay “The Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Boas had spent his career disproving theories such as these; Zora paid little heed.
Primitivism was by then a well-established ideology. It had its roots in colonialism, which reached its apex in the eighteenth century, with the slave trade funding expansion and empire. It was blended with exoticism, which glorified the other, but it applied that other to the self: for the primitivists, the exotic was innate, part of our instincts, and just needed to be set free. Primitivism was—and remains—part of a nostalgia for a preindustrial world.
By the 1920s, primitivism was inextricable from Negrophilia. The love of everything “Negro”—a category that paradoxically included jazz, Brazilian rhythms, African carvings, Eskimo art, and Aboriginal Australian poetry along with Harlem Renaissance literature and art—was sweeping high culture. In post–World War I France, art, music, literature, and dance were all utterly suffused with Negrophilia, informed by the latest anthropological findings, and these ideas traveled swiftly to New York.
Primitivism, like racism, promulgated racial differences based on colonialist fantasies. From the bananas that decorated the costumes of Josephine Baker to the jungle rhythms Duke Ellington played at the for-whites-only Cotton Club in Harlem and the jungle-based illustrations of Niggerati members Aaron Douglas and Bruce Nugent, it indulged in tropes associated with the tropics. But the very things that racists denigrated African Americans for, primitivists celebrated. And that celebration became, in the early twentieth century, a central tenet of modernism. In Emily Bernard’s words, “Primitivism was the avant-garde; it offered artists in a variety of media an exciting new way to think about culture.”
In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Zora memorably describes a kind of out-of-body experience at the New World Cabaret, a club she frequented with Langston and Van Vechten, among others:
This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks throug
h to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know.
Zora here not only identifies African American culture with hoary stereotypes of the jungle, as did Locke, Charlotte Mason, Cullen, and so many others, but becomes the metaphor herself.
Langston wrote something very similar in his 1923 “Poem”—“All the tom-toms of the jungle beat in my blood. / And all the wild hot moons of the jungles shine in my soul.” (Countee Cullen would take the same experience as the main subject of his famous poem “Heritage,” written in 1925.) This metaphor had already appeared in Langston’s 1922 “Danse Africaine” (both poems were republished in The Weary Blues) and would again in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”: “the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”
Compare Zora’s and Langston’s descriptions to this one by their friend Carl Van Vechten. In May 1926, Zora took him and a few friends to “a sanctified church in a real estate dealer’s office [in Harlem], where there is shoutin’, moanin’, yelling during & praying hours on end to the music of a cornet & guitar & jumping and dancing. Exactly like the jungle. The guitar plunks a rhythm like a tom-tom.”
That’s the major difference between primitivists like Zora and Langston and their exoticist contemporaries like Alain Locke, Van Vechten, and the white tourists that the latter shepherded to Harlem. The exoticists take safaris and point at the wildlife, while the primitivists enter the jungle and become its denizens.
And for the African Americans among them, hearing the jungle tom-toms beating in their blood wasn’t a matter of proliferating stereotypes but of linking themselves with the mythical home that slavery had robbed them of.
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Although widely published in the three primary black magazines—The Crisis, Opportunity, and The Messenger—the writers of the Niggerati, Langston foremost among them, felt that these outlets were largely hidebound and stale. Besides, their circulation was tiny: Opportunity sold only 11,000 copies per month, with only about 7,000 to black readers. As Zora put it in a letter to Alain Locke, “ ‘The Crisis’ is the house org. of the N.A.A.C.P. and ‘Opportunity[’] is the same to the Urban League. They are in literature on the side, as it were.” A new magazine was called for, one that would capture their voices—for truly, with their earthy and unconstrained visions, they were at the vanguard of the new Negro art. And Langston was to be at the vanguard of this new magazine, Fire!! “Always guiding unobtrusively,” as Nugent put it, it was Langston who suggested that Wallace Thurman be editor, he who insisted that Aaron Douglas do the cover artwork—in black on red. On “sweltering summer evenings,” as Langston later wrote, the Niggerati met and plotted.
At the end of July, Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven was published. Its title was taken from the term for the section of the theater (the balcony) in which black people were forced to sit; as the balcony was to the theater, Harlem was to Manhattan. It was far from the first well-intentioned white literary work to use the “n-word” in its title: it was preceded by Joseph Conrad’s 1897 novella The Nigger of the Narcissus, Edward Sheldon’s 1909 play The Nigger, Clement Wood’s 1922 novel Nigger, and Ronald Firbank’s 1924 novel Prancing Nigger (whose title had been suggested by Van Vechten himself). A literary effort to portray and promote the infinite variety of Harlem’s culture, Nigger Heaven was successful: it received high praise from literati like H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; it sold 100,000 copies, more than any other Harlem Renaissance novel, and not only to white readers. Langston wrote to Alain Locke that “colored people can’t help but like it,” and his mother pronounced it “our people to a ‘T’ ”; Charles Johnson and James Weldon Johnson gave it laudatory reviews. (A few months later, after a lawsuit was filed against Van Vechten for using a copyrighted song without permission, Langston wrote over a dozen lyrics for the seventh and subsequent printings of the novel.) But W. E. B. Du Bois savaged it in The Crisis, writing, “Life to [Van Vechten] is just one orgy after another, with hate, hurt, gin, and sadism,” and recommending that the book be dropped in the sewer. Harlem newspapers refused to advertise it, criticizing it for its mangling of black dialect and its obsession with the most sordid aspects of Harlem’s nightlife; a rumor went around that Van Vechten had been hanged in effigy on Lenox Avenue; and to his great chagrin he was barred from Small’s nightclub—though they let him back in when Zora accompanied him. Van Vechten biographer Edward White writes, “As many black people saw it, a wealthy white man from downtown had come up to tear around Harlem and then taunted its inhabitants with a book portraying black life as dripping in sex and drugs and violence, capping it off with the most offensive word possible.”
Nigger Heaven is a clumsy and sensationalist novel about the clash between the black middle-class and the new hedonists of the Harlem scene. Its message is clear: no compromise between the two camps is possible. In that, it affirmed one of the central premises of Langston’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and Zora’s “The Characteristics of Negro Expression.” There was an uncrossable divide between the generation of W. E. B. Du Bois and that of Josephine Baker.
David Levering Lewis argues that the “unmistakable message” of the novel is encapsulated in the words spoken by a character named Lasca Sartoris: “Negroes aren’t any worse off than anybody else. They’re better off if anything. They have the same privileges that white women had before the bloody fools got the ballot. They’re considered irresponsible like children and treated with special fondness.” Certain of the Niggerati shared that point of view—particularly Zora, who gloried in, cultivated, and considered herself deserving of the advantages of differential treatment. The black critic Emily Bernard, on the other hand, says that the novel’s “central lesson” is that “blacks must hold on to their true savage selves or risk something worse than neurosis—annihilation.” This affirmation of primitivism—“a birthright that all the civilized races were struggling to get back to,” in Van Vechten’s words—was catnip to the Niggerati, who had placed themselves in opposition to the more “civilized” members of their race.
The Niggerati rallied around Van Vechten. After all, they had been to so many of his parties that Walter White, who would soon be head of the NAACP, referred to Van Vechten’s apartment as the organization’s midtown branch; it was a place where black and white editors, writers, artists, and philanthropists could mix freely with each other, and the Niggerati—especially Zora and Langston—attended frequently. Moreover, Van Vechten had done far more for the Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, and musicians than any other of his race, getting them published, publicizing them in Vanity Fair, and introducing them to white high society—all without condescension or sycophancy. The attacks on Van Vechten were attacks on everything the Niggerati believed in—the validity of native black expression; the refusal to idealize black life; the freedom to live, create, and behave in ways that the black middle class frowned upon. The new magazine, Fire!!, would be their vindication.
As Langston would later relate, seven of the Niggerati—Langston, Zora, Aaron Douglas, Bennett, Davis, Thurman, and Nugent, in the order they would be listed on Fire!!’s Board of Editors’ letterhead—gathered one night to found “a Negro quarterly of the arts to épater le bourgeois, to burn up a lot of the stereotyped Uncle Tom ideas of the past, and to provide us with an outlet for publishing not existing in the hospitable but limited pages of The Crisis or Opportunity.” (It’s unclear exactly where they gathered. Langston wrote that it was at Aaron Douglas’s apartment at 409 Edgecombe in
Sugar Hill, but Douglas didn’t move there until 1934.) Each was to contribute fifty dollars toward production expenses—no small amount in those days.
Thurman was an inspired choice as editor. “Strangely brilliant,” as Langston described him, he “had read everything . . . because he could read eleven lines at a time.” He criticized everything he read, yet could take nothing truly seriously. His energy, dedication, high standards, and insouciance were critical to Fire!!’s publication.
Two days before the magazine was to go to press, Bruce Nugent visited Zora. They had a philosophical conversation about subjectivity and objectivity; Nugent said, “Over collards and black-eyed peas and things, Zora would have these philosophical conversations sometimes.” That day Nugent discovered that Zora’s brother Everett had accidentally burned up the proofs of his story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” which had been lying around her apartment; she did her best to comfort him, and then he “took a roll of toilet paper and several paper bags and got on the subway and wrote the thing over again.” He would never have done this without Zora’s encouragement, he said, “because I wouldn’t have believed I could have done it. But with Zora, there was no question. You can do it.” He was only nineteen, and Zora and Langston were the only people he knew “who could say that this was good, bad, or indifferent, and I would listen, I mean really listen.”