But what—I dream!
* * *
I remember when years ago Karen C. Dalton first showed me the Image of the Black in Western Art project’s files at Harvard. Henry Louis Gates Jr. gave me a tour of the Du Bois Institute. It was beyond what Du Bois had hoped for, and they were going to complete his Encyclopedia Africana. There is so much to know, as waters cover the sea. More black people in the West speak Spanish or Portuguese than they do English. However, black American culture has had global influence because of language. Then, too, we were not distant colonies, out of sight, out of mind. We were right there, side by side with our Protestant oppressors. The same was true in Brazil, which may not have had the biblically inspired texts of abolition, being Catholic, but, being also Umbanda and Candomblé, it had a very human history of repeated slave revolts.
Black people were there, we were everywhere, even at the beginning of the picaresque tradition in Spanish literature: the narrator of The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, and His Adventures and Adversities, published anonymously in 1554, sets off on his adventures in a Spain where the feudal order is breaking down because his widowed mother has taken up with a former soldier, a black man. This isn’t just me being relieved that the taboo of my youth against having anything to do with European culture has been lifted. It is a world shaped by slavery and the ideologies that went with it that these discoveries are mostly concerned with. France does not have a Muslim problem; it has a race problem, one that finds expression as violent religious extremism. Its Arab population is not recent. Arabs have been in France for a century. Abdellah Taïa, a young, gay, Arab writer and filmmaker, is clear that he can be himself in Paris, yet to write as himself, he must make French a language of the displaced person.
In 2015, a revived Rhodes Must Fall campaign at the University of Cape Town succeeded in having a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed. The following year, the Oxford Union voted in favor of taking down the statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, but benefactors strenuously objected. In 2017, Afua Hirsch, a black woman journalist who grew up in Wimbledon, deemed the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square offensive and argued that Britain should examine its public monuments as people were doing in the United States. But Trafalgar has street musicians, daring roller skaters, artists working in chalk on the pavement, and tourists, not white supremacists galvanized by Nelson’s defense of slavery. The problem with opposing this sort of revision in the United Kingdom is that hardly anything would be left and that I find myself in the company of some politicians and cultural figures I’d rather not be on the same side with.
At the same time, Britain, it often seems, never wants to be confronted with the history or consequences of empire, though the Windrush generation has been painfully eloquent about having been made stateless because the country that told the black immigrants they officially belonged sneakily canceled their memberships, so to speak, once their labor was no longer needed. What connects the riots in Brixton in London in 2011 to the riots in Toxteth in Liverpool in 1981 is that both began with police incidents. And yet I was caught off guard by the delight among black women in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom that black America had married into the royal family. Sterling Brown objected to the metaphor of the Invisible Man because, he said, black people are not invisible. We are seen. It was what others said was there when they saw us that was the problem.
Those places in Europe that I used to think of as havens aren’t anymore, engulfed and overwhelmed as they are. Brexit has people hoarding chocolate and medicine, though much of London appears to be in what we like to call denial. Some have compared the mood to the Phony War of 1940. It’s not happening, after all. But the Act of Union itself is at risk. It is alarming that Brexit has given so many the license to make racist remarks openly, with gusto, while the homeless doss down in doorways, shiver on the concrete floors of construction sites. European politics are being influenced by those manipulated waves of anti-immigration populism, an expression of anxiety about scarcity of resources. The far right advances in Spain. Border police on the perilous Channel intercept small craft loaded with people who have been traveling hundreds of miles, and Italy wants to set up centers in Africa to try to prevent migrants from casting their lives onto the Mediterranean. Aging Europe needs young immigrants. But anything I say today about the situation in Europe will be overtaken by events tomorrow.
* * *
When I am back on 135th Street, in Harlem, on my way to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, now headed by the poet Kevin Young, it’s not James Baldwin I think of but, rather, Claude McKay and what happened to him when his sojourn in Europe was over. He has one of the most interesting biographies of the Harlem Renaissance, starting with how he got away from Jamaica, where he was born in 1889. His first two volumes were of dialect poems, work encouraged by Walter Jekyll, the British folklore collector of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. His sister was Gertrude Jekyll, pioneer of the English cottage garden, and their grandfather was Joseph Jekyll, author of The Life of Ignatius Sancho, which serves as the preface to The Letters of Ignatius Sancho, an African. Walter Jekyll was willing to pay for McKay’s education at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, expecting the dark, handsome young man to return and play a part in the agricultural life of the island.
McKay never went back. From the racial terror of Alabama, he quickly made his way to the openness of Kansas. In 1914, he got to New York, where he was briefly married, survived by wrestling with pots in kitchens, met black socialists and Communists uptown and white Communists and socialists downtown. In 1919, race riots—whites attacking blacks—broke out in several U.S. cities, the bloodiest in Chicago. At the same time, the newly empowered FBI was deporting radicals such as Emma Goldman. To protest the violence of the Red Summer and the Red Scare, McKay published “If We Must Die,” his sonnet of defiance, in a socialist newspaper. It was widely reprinted in the black press. He was invited to London, where he worked for a year on suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought. The United Kingdom had also had its racial strife in 1919, with fights breaking out between white and black workers at docks in Cardiff and London.
McKay was also aware that he was in England at a time when white artists and critics of a modernist avant-garde were discovering the art of Africa. Picasso had paid his visit to Matisse’s studio and had had his fateful encounter with African art in the Musée d’Ethnographie. After World War I, civilization’s catastrophe, after Paul Guillaume’s 1919 exhibition of his African art collection in Paris and the arrival there of jazz, the primitive, or primitivism, spread through the arts as a virtue, a reaction as much to previous styles in art as to the old social order. McKay’s first discussions of primitivism had taken place in a salon of early Garveyites. He said they met under futurist paintings at the Phyllis Wheatley Hotel in Harlem during World War I. The group discussed far into the night the influence blacks were having on art and literature. White artists and writers, he said, were turning everything upside down in an attempt to achieve the wisdom of “the primitive Negro.”
“I went to the Niggers’ show in Chelsea,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her Diary on a day when she had a toothache. “Very sad impressive figures; obscene; somehow monumental; figures of Frenchmen, I thought, sodden with civilization & cynicism; yet they were carved (perhaps) in the Congo 100’s of years ago.” After hearing one of Roger Fry’s lectures on Paul Guillaume’s African art exhibition, which Fry had been instrumental in bringing to London, Woolf says in a letter to Vanessa Bell, “heaven knows what real feeling I have about anything after hearing Roger discourse. I dimly see that something in their style might be written, and also that if I had one on the mantelpiece I should be a different sort of character—less adorable, as far as I can make out, but somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry.”
McKay had also gone to the “Niggers’ show” in London in 1920, possibly in the company of C. K. Ogden, the author of The Meaning of Meaning. McKay minded that the objects had no aesth
etic value for white art critics until placed by a Frenchman in the bourgeois context, as he called it, of an exhibition. When the British invaded Benin in 1885, he explained, they were startled by the civilization they found there. They brought back splendid ivory carvings and bronze statues of “the ugly black kings of Benin on horseback.” No one knew what they were, so the treasures were sent to the ethnological section of the British Museum. They were, for McKay, a silent reproach to British imperialism. “Sad, strange, perfect, lonely—like the melodies of African slaves and the stories of Negro domestic animals of the West Indies.”
In 1922, McKay was off again, to the Soviet Union. He could not imagine his writing life subject to Comintern discipline, and in 1923 he was once more on the move. He went to Berlin, which was then in the throes of economic turbulence. There was no milk, because, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, German farmers had to give most of their cattle to France. Germans also resented the French government using Senegalese troops to occupy the Ruhr. A medal was struck in Munich, showing a thick-lipped, helmeted black soldier in profile on one side and on the other a naked white woman tied to the shaft of a soaring, triumphant dick. McKay found some work as an artist’s model and a white American man to pay for his drinks, but life in Weimar Berlin was bewildering in its improvisations.
He went to Paris, and from there to Toulon. Brest was followed by Nice and nearby Cap Nègre. He traveled from Marseille to Rabat, and from Barcelona to Tangier. What spoils his letters to editors and friends is that so many of them are begging letters and he was so angry that he had to plead. Not a flaneur, though as lonely, he worked constantly, illness often accompanying his poverty. He wrote political journalism and would have an ever harder time placing it. He was remembered in the United States for his volume of poetry Harlem Shadows, published in 1922, and his novel Home to Harlem, which came out in 1928, was a late bestseller of the Harlem Renaissance. The following year he published Banjo, an awkward yet extraordinary novel about the meetings between transient African seamen and European lumpen wanderers in the port of Marseille, their scene observed by a displaced, questing black intellectual from the United States. McKay went as far as he dared to suggest the fluid sexual identities possible in such a milieu. He destroyed the manuscript of his first novel, because he’d been told it was too risqué.
McKay’s fictions with Jamaican settings that he published in the early 1930s didn’t sell. He was living in Morocco when political and economic uncertainty pushed him back to the United States in 1934. He wound up in a camp for destitute men in upstate New York, until he was rescued by Max Eastman, a friend and former editor, who helped him secure a book contract that enabled him to write his autobiography, A Long Way from Home. It appeared in 1937, to some hostile reviews from his peers. He failed to find a publisher for two more collections of his poetry. He was employed by the Federal Writers’ Project, and that, together with his work on a huge survey, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, kept him going for a while. But in 1939 noncitizens were barred from the Federal Writers’ Project, and his Harlem survey was a commercial failure when it was published in 1940. He’d abandoned a novel that he started in 1936 about a Harlem cult, and a novel highly critical of Communists in Harlem was rejected by publishers. He had been so hopeful about his novel that he never mentioned the book again. Instead, his health broke.
I think of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance who died, fell silent, or, like McKay, could not interest publishers in their work once the vogue for things Negro ended with the Great Depression. The letters of Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston as they looked for security with the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s and survived into the 1940s are as sobering as anything from that luckless Victorian toiler George Gissing. We tend to regard black literature as a category of the avant-garde, but pathfinders like McKay, Hughes, and Hurston were, not surprisingly, desperate for commercial success. Hurston was dismayed that white writers were having hits on Broadway using what she considered her material, while she had to charm a college theater department into putting on her plays.
The intellectual was the only character missing in the American novel, Philip Rahv declared in “The Cult of Experience in American Writing,” published in Partisan Review in 1940, around the time McKay was in Harlem, trying to hold on to his writing life, he who had had experience thrust upon him as a black man in a white world and responded by voicing opposition to totalitarianism in any guise and calling for black power. Justice for the oppressed was worth fighting for, all of McKay’s writing said. New scholarship urges us to view the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement as part of a transatlantic, bilingual culture. Everything was contained in the American novel except ideas, Rahv continued, on another planet, the one where black literature and its themes were ignored.
McKay was bitterly anti-Communist toward the end of his life, though he had never been one of the faithful, like Hughes or Robeson. And unlike John Dos Passos, he did not in his anti-communism become ever more right wing, even after converting to Catholicism just before he left New York in 1944. Richard Wright was adamant that he would not be like Harlem Renaissance writers. Histories of the Federal Writers’ Project show us that McKay’s and Wright’s generations of black writers overlapped more than we are used to considering. But it would appear that McKay could no more get along with younger writers than he could with writers of his own age, difficult being that he was. Eating bread in the dust, he worked for a Catholic settlement house in Chicago and died in 1948. His example haunts me. He paid for having been away so long. One day he woke up and discovered that he was out of it and unwanted.
* * *
We are now as far from Modernism as Modernism was from Romanticism, and I sometimes wonder what a later time will call this era. Zadie Smith, an expatriate herself, or a commuter, is right when she says that our time may be fragile in many ways, but a second black renaissance is going on, and it is international. Moreover, it is not happening in literature alone, but in film and art and music as well. The culture of the black diaspora has arrived. Again. Maybe hip-hop led the way: seize control. This is the age of intellectual property rights enforcement, though Shakespeare is the wizard of appropriation. White editors accused of inhibiting black writers, acting as gatekeepers, censors—I am reminded of the fury of the Black Arts Movement fifty years ago, except these accusations are not coming from a militant fringe.
I look at Zadie, who hates Thomas Mann, and other black writers of her generation and younger, and think I know what Sterling Brown would say. Let the light shine upon them. Many of them are mixed-race, descended from, to me, exotic combinations. The range of blackness has expanded. But Sterling also really minded being thought of as a Harlem Renaissance poet in his youth, because, he contended, it certainly was not a renaissance for most black people. I look at the young and also experience a twinge, because I am not fluent in what they are talking about or don’t agree with what I think they’re saying. I’ve spent so much time dwelling on the past that when I wake up and realize that the present is out there, it makes me anxious. I can’t keep up, and often I can’t sign on. I feel this renaissance, but it is altogether weird for me that it is taking place at a time when liberal culture is in crisis.
Sterling Brown was a formidable presence. He seemed to know everything about black culture and black history. Perhaps the most profound change in black culture since his death thirty years ago is that one person cannot know everything there is to know about black culture and black history anymore. Someone told me to reflect on how Fra Angelico reacted, knowing that a renaissance was going on around him and sensing that he was not a part of it. Be yourself unto the end.
* * *
I returned to Berlin after several years away for what became my own private observance of the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice, with Alfred Döblin’s trilogy, November 1918, very much on my mind. I watched the sun come up over the gray undulating rows of the Jewish Memorial. I turned away from the l
ittle stage in front of the Brandenburg Gate. The end of World War I meant trouble for Germany. It was not a day to be celebrated.
Angela Merkel deserved praise for the refuge she offered Syrians fleeing war, whether Germany could afford to help or not. But I heard a woman say that it was dangerous for German women to have young, single Arab men on German streets. She was not alone in her old-fashioned racial hysteria. Even though the Greens are doing as well as neo-fascists in elections, somehow the hope of thirty years ago has vanished. I noted that in the German History Museum, the chapter on German colonialism occupied a single glass case under some stairs. The wall text acknowledged that the German Army massacred thousands of the Herero and Nama people in the early twentieth century. I left the museum and walked the rainy streets. I sat in places where I used to hang out for hours. I waited to feel something.
2018
VI
THE REAL HARLEM
Old heads in Harlem will tell you that in the 1960s, particularly after the riot of 1964, white policemen were afraid of walking an uptown beat. They were reluctant to come through even in patrol cars. Those who did were often on the take. White landlords would try to collect the rent, guns at their hips. Their black tenants defied them, and in many cases the landlords walked away from their buildings, left them to run down.
Harlem was the place where you could do or get anything and get away with it. People would disappear for days into the cathouses and shooting galleries. One guy told me that at his corner of 124th Street and Lenox he once saw the garbage collectors in their truck nodding from heroin. They were parked for hours, the trash uncollected when they finally left. Delivery trucks at stoplights got held up. Sometimes a driver would be enticed by a woman to a room where he was then tied up. Down in the street, an orderly line was forming for the sale of his truck’s contents.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 31