When Washington Was In Vogue

by Edward Christopher Williams

  Her voice shook as she spoke.

  “Answer me one question, Davy Carr, on your honor! Do you mean all that—all—literally? ”

  “All that—and infinitely more, Caroline. There are no words adequate to express all I feel.”

  She sat silent, still looking into the fire. I had to settle things one way or the other.

  “Could you learn to care for me—do you think—after a while, maybe?”

  “No!” My heart almost stopped as she paused on the monosyllable. “No! I couldn’t learn it now, Davy, for I learned it weeks ago.”

  Then she turned her black eyes full on me, their natural boldness softened by a warm blush which mantled her from throat to brow. Somehow in my rebound from the misery of the days just past, I felt afraid to move, as if I feared by so doing to destroy this beautiful illusion. Then she continued.

  “I think I loved you from the first day, but I am not sure. When I was sure, I was in a panic at the thought of the things I had done to shock you. You always treated me beautifully, but it seemed more as a good-natured brother might treat a mischievous little sister, of whom he is fond, but whom he does not take seriously. I don’t see how you could have failed to notice things. I stopped smoking cigarettes because of you, Davy; and I stopped drinking with the men because of you; and I stopped coming to your room because I did not want to seem to be seeking you—I had never thought of that before. When I told Dr. Corey I could never love him, I told him that I loved someone else, and I am sure he knew it was you. Then I waited for you to seek me. That’s a terribly hard thing for a woman to do sometimes, Davy. Then Will King came back, and I let him come here partly because I had to have an escort, and he is a gentleman through and through, and partly because I was mortally afraid lest someday, if I did not keep myself busy, I might let you see how I felt and you, not caring that way for me, might think I was running after you. And, Davy, I remembered every one of those foolish things I had done. They used to rise up and haunt me nights when I lay awake, and I could not rid myself of the memory of the many times when I had seen disapproval in your eyes. To cap the climax, you started running after Billie Riddick. I don’t like to seem to reflect on Billie, for she’s always been square with me, and I like her. But, to say no more, Billie’s not the kind of a girl one would expect you to run after. If it had been Lillian, now—I was always a little afraid of her—I think I should not have minded quite so much. Well, I don’t know exactly why I am telling you all this, except perhaps that you have put your cards on the table for me, and I am not afraid to do the same for you.” She paused for a moment. Then, “That’s all, Davy,” she said softly, and looked up at me from under her long lashes.

  “I’ve been pinching myself, for fear that I might be dreaming,” I said. “I wonder if to prove that you have understood and forgiven me for the kisses taken by force, you would give me one, Caroline, freely and from your heart.”

  “Not from my heart, with my heart, Davy—my Davy!”

  And she did. If I could describe that moment, I would, so that when I am an old man I might read that description, and live it over. But I cannot describe it nor do I need to do so, for I shall never, never forget it!

  “What did Billie Riddick say to you that made you wait for me?”

  Caroline laughed a merry little laugh.

  “She said: ‘If I cared enough for a man, Caroline Rhodes, to step between him and a crazy man with an automatic, I should not let him go away tomorrow morning without a word of farewell. And he’s going, and he’s never coming back. There are one or two nice girls in this room who would be glad to give him that good-bye.’ ”

  Then she snuggled her pretty head close down against my shoulder, and I felt the velvet of her cheek against mine, and I breathed into my eager nostrils the magic perfume of Fleurs d’Amour!

  COMMENTARY

  by Emily Bernard

  When Washington Was in Vogue is a novel. Disregard the original title, The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair. Ignore the teasing of “The Publishers” about the “pains” taken to conceal the identities of protagonist Davy Carr’s friends. Resist the letters themselves as they silently exhort you to enjoy them as authentic correspondence. This is not as easy as it sounds. The world that Edward Christopher Williams has created in these pages is vivid and exhilarating, and the characters that populate this world are sometimes outrageous, sometimes compassionate, and always wonderfully and poignantly human. It requires real effort to remember that When Washington Was in Vogue is only a story, albeit a most remarkable one.

  One of the most remarkable features of When Washington Was in Vogue is its geographical setting. It has become almost obligatory in the world of Harlem Renaissance scholarship to argue that the term Harlem Renaissance” is something of a misnomer; that as much of the period’s cultural achievements took place outside of the borders of New York City as within them. When Washington Was in Vogue is the first piece of fiction to put flesh on this thesis, and present a portrait of black life and culture that is as thrilling as anything Harlem could have conceived. If anything, the intensified insularity of black Washington society serves as an even more fertile ground for intrigue, African-American style. As Adam McKible points out in his introduction, “Unlike every other novel written by an African American during this period, there is not a single white character in When Washington Was in Vogue.” In Harlem Renaissance novels, white characters are often present to underscore the disadvantages and hypocrisies of segregation that are at the heart of their tragic plot-lines. White racism is only a back-drop in Davy Carr’s world, and plays, at the most, only an implicit role in the drama of daily life for privileged black Washingtonians.

  The absence of white antagonists in When Washington Was in Vogue does not mean that the story is bereft of villains. Colored society in Washington, seemingly, does not need white racism to supply all of its venom. Here, Langston Hughes describes black Washington as he experienced it when he lived there in the mid-1920s:

  …. the “better class” of Washington colored people, as they called themselves, drew rigid class and color lines within the race against Negroes who worked with their hands, or who were dark in complexion and had no degrees from colleges. These upper-class colored people consisted largely of government workers, professors and teachers, doctors, lawyers, and resident politicians. They were on the whole as unbearable and snobbish a group of people as I have ever come in contact with anywhere. They lived in comfortable homes, had fine cars, played bridge, drank Scotch, gave exclusive “formal”parties, and dressed well, but seemed to me altogether lacking in real culture, kindness, or good common sense.

  Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940), 207.

  The dramas of this heartless group make up the world of When Washington Was in Vogue. Just as Langston Hughes suggests, its members can be quite dreadful. But Hughes’s description above leaves out a few things, namely the style, wit, and charm that characterize this group as much as its bad behavior. The devils described above are anything but dull. Betrayals are carried out with colorful language and in fetching evening wear. As Hughes himself admitted in a scathing 1927 indictment of the same crowd, “Our Wonderful Society: Washington,” published in the August 1927 issue of Opportunity, he found himself “awed” by these self-described “best people.” Even in their ugliness the “better class” of black Washingtonians captivate. Shallow creatures they may be, but what they represent is hardly frivolous. The contradictions they embody—a simultaneous dedication to race unity and rigid intraracial hierarchies—have always been, and may always be, fundamental aspects of black society. When Washington Was in Vogue pulls back the curtain and unapologetically reveals the timelessly unattractive underside of black elitism and the poignant contradictions that are an inherent feature of the project of “race uplift.”

  Captain Davy Carr enters this world largely unprepared for the social complexities he is about to encounter. He is fresh from a stint
as an officer in World War I, but he has neither the weapons nor the battle plans he needs to navigate the gender and class wars that are Washington’s black subculture. For a Harlem Renaissance novel, When Washington Was in Vogue has a most unusual protagonist. Davy Carr is, first of all, older than the young men and women with whom most Harlem Renaissance fiction is preoccupied. He bears no resemblance to the hedonistic, dissipated, cynical young men and women that play both major and minor roles in other Harlem Renaissance novels, like The Blacker the Berry; Infants of the Spring; Home to Harlem; Quicksand; and Nigger Heaven. Davy Carr is a model of focus, sobriety, and industry: having served in World War I, he is in Washington to research a book on the African slave trade. The bawdy pursuits that characterize the Jazz Age, activities that readers turn to these books to experience vicariously, hold no interest for the captain. Here Davy Carr describes his reactions to an evening spent at a cabaret:

  The songs were of a type whose cheapness, vulgarity, banality, and utter lack of wit, humor, harmony, or distinction of any kind, simply defy description… . The themes were hackneyed beyond the power of my poor pen to depict, and how any human being with a spark of intelligence—I don’t say decency—could sit and listen to them, except under actual compulsion, is more than I can fathom.

  In his utter conservatism, Davy Carr is actually an intriguing addition to the panorama of memorable characters in Harlem Renaissance fiction. Davy’s priggishness is somehow refreshing and even daring when juxtaposed with the reverential manner in which cabaret scenes are often experienced and narrated in novels from this period. But most importantly, the voluptuous language Davy uses to describe his distaste for the scene hints to his true ambivalent feelings about such scenes, and the changing social world they represent.

  The object of Carr’s passionate prose is Bob Fletcher, Davy’s former comrade-in-arms and present correspondent. The relationship between Davy and Bob recalls the dynamic between Jake and Ray in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, similarly suggesting, at times, a homoeroticism that lies beneath the surface of both novels’ ostensible plots. When Washington Was in Vogue resembles Home to Harlem by Claude McKay in its preoccupation with the smorgasbord of women its male protagonist encounters. E. C. Williams’s sirens are not the dizzying “chocolate browns” that Jake beholds but rather a set of chic, urbane women whose reserved, subtle ways are no less enticing and bewildering than the more explicit come-hithering that Jake navigates in Home to Harlem. Davy Carr may lack Jake’s smoothness and confidence, but he is, privately, an eroticist, much like his counterpart in Home to Harlem. Here, Davy writes to Bob about one memorable evening:

  I had the exquisite pleasure of being fed from time to time by the loveliest hands in the world—on both sides of me—and if in the process of taking marshmallows from the fingertips of Beauty, I now and then missed the marshmallows and got more than my share of the fingertips, who can blame me?

  However attenuated, Davy Carr’s sensuality is clear in his language, and it is also evidenced by the care with which he reproduces this moment for his friend. He recounts his life to Bob Fletcher with the kind of doting tenderness and exacting detail that suggests more than a casual bond—it signifies an intimate connection. The epistolary form this novel takes contributes to the sense of intimacy between the two men, and enables readers to appreciate this story on a more subtle level than a conventional novel. When Washington Was in Vogue reminds us of the important role correspondence has always played in our deep, human need to testify to our experience, and to assign order and meaning to the things that happen to us. In this book, letters are not only records of love and desire, but expressions of it, as well.

  When Washington Was in Vogue is singularly preoccupied with the doings of one Caroline Rhodes, even though she is not the possessor of either set of fingertips that found their way into Davy Carr’s mouth during the evening Davy remembers above. Even though, as Adam McKible asserts in his introduction, When Washington Was in Vogue is not a feminist novel, there are fascinating women everywhere in this book, frankly sensuous, free-thinking, plain-speaking women. But none of these women has as much to offer readers as does Caroline Rhodes: “the prettiest, trimmest, shapeliest little brown girl you ever saw, with the boldest black eyes I ever looked into,” Davy Carr gushes to Bob Fletcher shortly after his first encounter with Caroline. All of the women in the Rhodes family are exceptional but Caroline is the “flower of the flock.” Indeed, Caroline Rhodes may be among the most memorable characters in Harlem Renaissance fiction. Like Clare Kendry in Passing, she is a young woman who fails to heed conventional attitudes about decorum and female behavior. She smokes, makes off-color jokes, and glories in a variety of male company. When she is with Davy, she lodges sarcastic barbs, teases him into doing her schoolwork, and steals his cigarette holder. Davy’s hesitant sensuality is outdistanced by Caroline’s no-holds-barred approach to racy banter. Early in the novel, when Davy suggests the he might give her a spanking if she were his daughter, Caroline keeps the joke alive, inflecting Davy’s “innocent” comment with raunchy sexual innuendo. To put it simply, Caroline Rhodes is a delight.

  Importantly, Caroline is also brown-skinned, unapologetically so. She is not “tragically colored,” to use the phrase coined by Zora Neale Hurston in her essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Caroline Rhodes is a refreshing, ribald antidote to the panorama of black women in Harlem Renaissance fiction who lament blackness, their own or others’. She is no Emma Lou Morgan who, in The Blacker the Berry, swallows arsenic wafers to lighten her complexion. She would only pity Olivia Blanchard Cary, who in Jessie Fauset’s Comedy: American Style drives her own son to suicide, so disgusted is she by his brown skin. Caroline Rhodes wears her blackness beautifully. When she comes across the color prejudice of other women, she understands it as the manifestation of their helpless jealousy over her beauty and popularity, and walks away, untraumatized. If novels like The Blacker the Berry and Comedy: American Style wring their hands over the color question, then When Washington Was in Vogue turns on its heel and leaves the question for others to fret over, and makes its way to the next party, the next gripping romance, the next “toothsome repast.”

  For much of the novel, Caroline’s primary pursuit is pleasure. She may be a hedonist, but When Washington Was in Vogue refuses to allow you to take her for a mindless little flapper. She carefully fashions the persona that she parades in front of Davy, the object of her desire, and she delights in the confusion it causes him. As a seductress, Caroline Rhodes is a diligent student of the lusty tradition; early in the novel, we find her in her parlor reading Madame Bovary. Caroline may actually have some tips for the romantic heroines she studies. As Davy swoons in a letter to Bob, “Indeed, she is a type of whom Jane Austen never dreamed, for all her dainty feminine beauty.”

  The union of Caroline Rhodes and Davy Carr is a case of opposites attracting, but it is also a uniting of generations and ideological trajectories in African-American culture. Will they or won’t they? The novel turns on this question, which finally concerns not only the possibility of the romantic coupling of Caroline and Davy, but also the generations they stand for, and ideological preoccupations these generations represent. Will the collective dreams of the race be realized? Will true racial unity be achieved? When Washington Was in Vogue imagines, through the characters of Caroline and Davy, that the conflict between the younger and older generations is not so much a rift, but a frustration of mutual curiosity, and that within this frustration itself lies the possibility for its solution.

  In its romantic significance alone, the “Will they or won’t they?” question is gripping. As a novel about romance, in all of its exquisite pain and pleasure, When Washington Was in Vogue is hypnotic. The reader is Bob Fletcher, receiving Davy’s panting, love-filled missives, rooting for him, anticipating his liberation from the blindness inspired both by his romantic thickness as well as by his generational anxieties about the dramatic cultural revolution African-American soci
ety seemed to be undergoing during the Jazz Age. “Yours, in deep trouble, Davy” is how Carr signs one of his letters to Bob. Trouble beckons Davy throughout these pages, trouble in the form of his own desire, as well as his conflict over the changing times and his role within them. Trouble calls Davy, and he answers willingly. As readers, we find ourselves urging Davy along into more and more dangerous, thrilling, unknown territory. Eagerly, we follow.

  FOOTNOTES

  1. There are a number of bio-bibliographic sources on Williams. My sketch draws from “Some Schoolmen,” July 1915, Crisis 10, 118—120; Porter, Dorothy B., 1947, “Phylon Profile, XIV: Edward Christopher Williams,” Phylon Vol. 7 (4), 315-321; Russell H. Davis, 1969, Memorable Negroes in Cleveland’s Past, Cleveland, Ohio: The Western Reserve Historical Society; and E. J. Josey, March 1970, “Edward Christopher Williams: Librarian’s Librarian,” Negro History Bulletin 33, 70-77.

  2. These stories can be found in manuscript in Howard University’s Founders Library.

  3. For an excellent discussion of World War I and its relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, see David Levering Lewis, 1989, When Harlem Was in Vogue, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. I am also grateful to Tedrina DaCosta for her research on this subject.

  4. Alain Locke, 1992, The New Negro. Intro. Arnold Rampersand. New York: Atheneum, 6.

  5. See Tom Lutz and Susanna Ashton, eds., 1996, These “Colored” United States; African American Essays from the 1920s, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 76-80.

  6. Claude McKay, 1921, “A Negro Extravaganza,” The Liberator, Vol. 4 (12): 24—26.

  7. Wallace Thurman, 1996, The Blacker the Berry, New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 21—22.