When Washington
Was In Vogue
ALSO BY ADAM McKIBLE, Ph. D.
The Space and Place of Modernism:
The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York
EDWARD CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
WITH COMMENTARIES BY
ADAM McKIBLE AND
EMILY BERNARD
AMISTAD
An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
When Washington
Was In Vogue
A LOVE STORY
{A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance}
when washington was in vogue. Edward Christopher Williams. Previously published anonymously as The Letters of Davy Carr in The Messenger, January 1925-June 1926. Commentary by Adam McKible copyright © 2003. Commentary by Emily Bernard copyright © 2003. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this commentary may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
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FIRST EDITION
Designed by Jennifer Ann Daddio
Printed on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 0-06-055545-9
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You sang far better than you knew.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,
“O BLACK AND UNKNOWN BARDS”
Acknowledgements
Literature is a profoundly collective endeavor. I am grateful to the following people and institutions for their help in making the republication of this novel possible. For their initial interest while I was in graduate school, thanks go to James Thompson, William L. Andrews, J. Lee Greene, and Robert Scholes. At John Jay College, I have been encouraged by all of my colleagues, especially Jon-Christian Suggs, Tim Stevens, Robert Crozier, John Matteson, Cristine Varholy, Erica Class, and Jacob Marini. I am also grateful to my union, the Professional Staff Congress; my project was funded (in part) by a grant from the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation. I could not have found a home for E. C. Williams’s novel without the help of Regina Bernard, to whom I am eternally grateful. Thanks to another former student, Tedrina Da Costa, with whom I spent an enjoyable semester analyzing the novel from myriad angles. My thanks to all of the librarians who helped keep Williams’s memory alive; I am particularly grateful to Teddy Abebe at Howard University and E. L. Josey, who carried Williams’s torch for many a year. I am fortunate to know Sian Hunter, Paul Harrington, and Kathleen Pfeiffer; their encouragement and advice helped me to keep the faith. Thanks to Barbara Foley for sharing information about the Williams-Toomer connection, and to Ganda Suthivarakom for her invaluable, last-minute help.
I owe my dear friend Richard Simon a debt of gratitude, because, without him, I would not have met Tanya McKinnon, dispenser of wisdom and agent extraordinaire.
Thanks to Kelli Martin at HarperCollins, who has understood from the outset the importance of this book.
My family has been with me every step of the way, and I am forever grateful to them.
Thanks, finally, to Julie, my life’s song and the love without whom I cannot live.
—Adam McKible
CONTENTS
Introduction by Adam McKible xiii
When Washington Was In Vogue 1
A Love Story
{A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance}
Commentary by Emily Bernard 278
INTRODUCTION
by Adam McKible
When Washington Was in Vogue is an extraordinary book of firsts. It was originally published anonymously under the title The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair in serial form in the African-American little magazine The Messenger, from January 1925 through June 1926. Written as a series of letters, it is most likely the first epistolary novel in the African-American literary tradition. It is also one of the first novels to offer an extensive and realistic portrayal of the black middle class in Washington, D.C., during the 1920s. And its author, Edward Christopher Williams, was the first professionally trained black librarian in America. Perhaps most extraordinary of all, however, is that When Washington Was in Vogue has lain dormant and unrecognized for almost eighty years.
I was in graduate school at the University of North Carolina when I originally came across When Washington Was in Vogue, and from its opening pages I realized that I had discovered an important but lost voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Here was a story of African Americans in Washington, D.C., the likes of which I had never seen before. I was not, however, thrilled by my discovery. At the time—about 1994 or 1995—I was as resistant to diving into When Washington Was in Vogue as Walker Percy was many years before when John Kennedy Toole’s mother coerced him into reading the barely legible draft of A Confederacy of Dunces. Acquiescing to Toole’s persistent mother, Percy agreed to read the manuscript, all the while hoping that he would be able to dismiss it as the amateur scribbling of a talentless hopeful:
There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no further. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.
In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.
I, too, was ambivalent and a bit bewildered by the treasure I had just unearthed. When I first found When Washington Was in Vogue, I was a harried graduate student with very little time and even less money. My greatest desire was to finish my dissertation—already far too many years in the making—and then throw my hat into the crowded and dismal academic job market. I simply didn’t have the time or resources to devote myself to undiscovered Harlem Renaissance novels, no matter how good they might be.
But When Washington Was in Vogue was so very good, and it was good from the first paragraph. I was immediately drawn in and compelled to read it from beginning to end, and I was richly rewarded, because When Washington Was in Vogue boasted a new narrative voice, a new kind of story, and a setting that had not been seen before in American literature. I had no choice but to adopt When Washington Was in Vogue as a personal cause, and decades after it was first published, to help it find its way toward a new readership. This is the first time it has been published in book form.
When I found When Washington Was in Vogue, I was researching what would become my first book, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York, a scholarly analysis of how small-circulation magazines of the 1910s and 1920s responded to the Russian Revolution. At the time, I was working on a chapter on The Messenger, one of the most important little magazines of the Harlem Renaissance, and my focus was on a series of articles about black life in America entitled “These ‘Colored’ United States.” Because I wanted my research to be thorough, I decided to read all of the other serialized pieces in the magazine’s eleven-year run. Like Walker Percy, I was not really hoping to find anything that I could or would need to use; I figured I had done enough research and that I was ready to write the chapter, move on to the next one, an
d then get my much overdue Ph. D. Hunkering down to my work, I read through George Schuyler’s long running “Hobohemia,” Floyd J. Calvin’s “Eight Weeks in Dixie” and “The Mirrors of Harlem,” and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Eatonville Anthology.” While some of these series were certainly wonderful to read, they were also unnecessary for my work, and I could happily set them aside and write my chapter.
But then along came When Washington Was in Vogue. While first reading The Messenger on microfilm, I had printed out copies of each installment of what I thought was another series of articles, just in case they might prove useful or necessary to my chapter. I felt it was my obligation to give When Washington Was in Vogue at least a quick scan before setting it aside for good and for ever. So, one afternoon, I settled down with fifty-five barely legible photocopied pages of what I was hoping would be a quick and dismissible read. Before very long, however, I was drawn into the vibrant social world of African-American Washington, D.C., in the 1920s, and I found myself in equal parts charmed with and amused by the keen insights and emotional obtuseness of Captain Davy Carr, the narrator and protagonist of what was not—as The Messenger’s publishers promised—a mere series of letters written by an anonymous observer. Instead, as I soon discovered, I was reading a finely crafted novel that demanded my attention. Despite the illegibility of those photocopied pages, I could not put them down.
Set in the fall and winter of 1922-1923, When Washington Was in Vogue tells the story of Davy Carr’s experiences in the lively black community of the nation’s capital. Davy, who served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army in France, has come to Washington in order to research his book on the African slave trade. In his letters to Bob Fletcher, a former comrade-in-arms, Davy relates his encounters with and observations about the people he meets. As the story unfolds, he also falls in love with his landlady’s daughter, Caroline Rhodes, a development that is apparent to everyone but Davy. Much of the book’s pleasure derives from Davy’s ability to write about his milieu so perceptively while also being unable to see the love blossoming right under his own nose.
As I read When Washington Was in Vogue, I realized that I had never heard about a book like this before. Here was an epistolary romance novel set in Washington, D.C., during the era commonly referred to as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Had anyone written about this book before? The novel was published anonymously—had anyone ever located its author? I scoured the shelves of my university library. I consulted with experts of African-American literature. I came away empty-handed. Nonetheless, I knew this was a novel that should be published, and I thought someone might be interested in reissuing it. I made a few tentative approaches to publishers, but without the author’s name, no one was interested. Turning my attention to the more pressing business of my dissertation, I set When Washington Was in Vogue aside, hoping to return to it before too long.
A few years passed, I received my degree, and then I moved to New York to teach at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. My photocopies of When Washington Was in Vogue languished while I attended to all the problems and challenges a new professor must inevitably face. I worked on other projects, all the while hoping to come back to my anonymous, undiscovered gem. Then, one day, a former student paid me a call. Regina Bernard had taken a number of classes with me at John Jay, and after graduation she went to Columbia University where she would become one of the first students to earn a master’s degree from that institution’s newly founded African-American Studies program. Because of our shared interest in African-American literature, Regina asked me if there were any projects she could help me with, and that’s when I told her about the anonymously published novel I had discovered a few years back. She quickly volunteered to help me search for its mysterious author.
Owing to my previous experience researching When Washington Was in Vogue, I imagined that Regina would encounter the same dead ends, and I did not expect to hear back from her any time soon. Much to my surprise, however, she contacted me within forty-eight hours with the name of the author: Edward Christopher Williams. Between my initial discovery of When Washington Was in Vogue and my conversation with Regina, the Internet had blossomed, and Google was on its way to becoming a household name. Regina did what now seems so sensible: She logged on to Google, typed in “Davy Carr,” and found a number of Web pages devoted to Edward Christopher Williams who, it turns out, was the first professionally trained black librarian in America. This was in the summer of 2001.
E. C. Williams was born to a mixed-race couple on February 11, 1871, in Cleveland, Ohio.1 His father, Daniel P. Williams, was from a well-established black family in Cleveland, and his mother, Mary Kilkary, was born in Tipperary, Ireland. Williams graduated with honors from public schools in Cleveland and went on to Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), where he made a name for himself as both a student and a varsity baseball player. In 1892, Williams graduated Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian, and shortly thereafter he secured a position as assistant librarian at Western Reserve’s Hatch Library.
Within two years, Williams became head librarian, a post he held until 1909. During those years, Williams earned a reputation as an outstanding librarian dedicated to enlarging that institution’s holdings and improving its physical condition. Originally self-taught as a librarian, Williams left Cleveland temporarily in 1899—1900 in order to study at the New York State Library School in Albany, where he completed the two-year course in a little over a year. He also taught courses in librarianship during his time at Western Reserve.
In 1902, Williams married Ethel Chesnutt, the daughter of author Charles W. Chesnutt, who wrote many short stories and such novels as The House Behind the Cedars. In 1909, Williams resigned his position as librarian and became principal of the M Street School (now the Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C. One of Williams’s best biographers, E. L. Josey, wonders what prompted this move, and he considers it “one of the ultimate questions of [Williams’s] life which remains unanswered.” When Josey visited Washington in 1967, he spoke with a number of Williams’s former colleagues, but “no one seemed to know or would run the hazard of a guess” about why Williams changed jobs (Josey, 73). There are hints, however, that racism played a role in Williams’s resignation from Hatch Library, and at least one source claims that he was “forced from his position” (Davis, 40). Unfortunately, this would not have been a surprising development in Jim Crow America, when so many African Americans were legally and culturally denied many rights and opportunities.
Williams served as principal until 1916, when he was lured away from M Street by Howard University, where he eventually fulfilled many roles. In addition to being head librarian, Williams taught numerous classes in library science and foreign languages. He remained at Howard until 1929. Although his biographers— particularly fellow librarians—point to Williams’s time at Western Reserve as the days of his greatest achievement because of his work at Hatch Library, he appears to have hit his real stride as a creative writer once he moved to Washington. During these years, he saw three of his plays performed: The. Chasm, The Exile (a drama about Renaissance Italy), and The Sheriff’s Children, an adaptation of Chesnutt’s short story of the same name. In addition, Williams contributed a number of anonymous pieces to magazines such as The Messenger, the most important being When Washington Was in Vogue. He may have also published under the pseudonym “Bertuccio Dantino.”
In 1929, Williams left the District in order to pursue a Ph. D. in library science at Columbia University. While in New York, he succumbed quickly to an unexpected illness and died on December 24, 1929, at the age of fifty-eight. Williams was survived by his wife, their son Charles, and a granddaughter, Patricia Ann Williams.
Williams’s biographers routinely speak of him in superlatives, and he was undoubtedly a brilliant and accomplished man who received steady and unconditional praise for his work as a student, athlete, librarian, scholar, teacher, translator, and writer. For al
l of his achievements, though, Williams seems to have been quite modest. In a 1931 eulogy for Williams, C. C. Williamson, Director of Libraries and the School of Library Service at Columbia University, quotes a former classmate of Williams’s, whose sketch represents a typical assessment of Williams’s character:
He was an outstanding member of my class on account of his achievements in scholarship and on the athletic field…. He bore his honors in a very modest and unassuming manner and was well liked by all members of the student body…. He had a very friendly nature, perhaps a little retiring, but a nice sense of humor and gentle manners.
The picture of Williams that arises out of his various biographies is of a dynamic but gentle, perhaps even genteel, man who gained people’s attention without seeming to demand or need it. He also appears to have been quite proud of his racial inheritance, because although he was fair enough to pass for white, he did not hide his background from anyone, despite the consequences. Judging from his literary output, I am tempted to suggest that he had become even more proud about being black after coming to Washington, but this is another aspect of Williams’s life that will have to be decided by future biographers.
There is one more facet of Williams’s character to consider, and it comes from probably his most famous literary acquaintance, Zora Neale Hurston. While she attended Howard University in the early 1920s, Hurston became familiar with Williams, and in her autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road, she paints a picture of him as something other than modest and genteel. In her recollection, Williams seemed magisterial to the undergraduate Hurston, but he was also witty, flirty, and playful:
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