by Carla Kaplan
Before long, thanks to Delilah, the thoroughly modern Bea is (like Hurst) wildly successful. But she has only an “imitation of life,” since she rules over a business rather than a home. Being a New Woman, apparently, has its drawbacks. Female happiness has “passed her by, all right, without leaving her the leisure to more than fleetingly comprehend it.” She has “built a colossus, when all she had ever wanted was a homelife behind Swiss curtains of her own hemming, with a man.” But because she is that “comparatively rare bird, woman in big business,” she is stuck with the “success of her success.”
Delilah tries to save the modern woman from herself. She urges Bea to get herself some “man lovin’” before it’s too late. Delilah’s insistence on Bea’s right to sexual satisfaction is the novel’s strongest feminist statement, but because Hurst puts it largely in Delilah’s voice, it does not get very far. Bea is never quite sure what she wants. And Delilah is preoccupied with her daughter, who’s grown from a sulky, self-pitying toddler into a dissembler and liar, passing for white to win popularity and approval. Delilah is as horrified as if she’d never heard of passing. “Dar ain’t no passing,” she insists, “ain’t no way to dye black white. . . . Black wimmin who pass, pass into damnation.” Delilah contends that Peola’s sin is rooted in her birth, coursing through the “blue-white blood” she inherited from her “pap.” That blood, Delilah maintains, like “wild white horses” in her veins, has doomed her daughter. Endorsing rather than challenging Delilah’s view, the novel ensures that Peola’s transgressions meet with misery. Blacks cannot and must not impersonate whites, the novel’s narrative logic insists.
That narrative logic may have been a more serious betrayal of Hurst’s Harlem friendships than even her depiction of Delilah. The nonsense of “blood talk” was precisely what so much Harlem Renaissance literature devoted itself to exposing. James Weldon Johnson’s 1917 Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man showed the ease with which blacks could learn codes of white behavior. George Schuyler’s 1925 Black No More showed how ridiculous society would become if “blood talk” was taken to the logical extremes of its hysterical fractional categories. Delilah’s belief that blood would inevitably “out” in surefire racial telltales such as a bluish tinge to the fingernails was parodied as so much “silly rot” in Nella Larsen’s 1929 Passing, which Van Vechten would certainly have pressed upon Hurst. The Rhinelander case was one example of the horrors of taking such “nonsense” seriously and the Scottsboro case was another. But Hurst’s Delilah, modeled so obviously on Aunt Jemima, is an Old Negro, and an insistence on old-fashioned, outworn white ideas of blackness. She is a minstrel figure with an “easily-hinged large mouth, packed with the white laughter of her stunning allotment of hound-clean teeth; the jug color of her skin . . . the terrific unassailable quality of her high spirits,” and with malapropisms, and mispronunciations. She is subservient and “unctuous,” always ready to soothe Bea’s daughter with her “black crocodile-like hand.” She wants nothing but resignation for her daughter: “Make her contented wid her lot,” she moans. Peola recoils from her mother. And, given what Hurst has made her, it is easy to see why: “The wide expanse of her face slashingly wet, the whites of her eyes seeming to pour rivulets down her face like rain against a window pane, her splayed lips dripping eaves of more tears,” Delilah is described. Delilah dies on the floor, kissing her mistress’s ankles. Delilah, Sterling Brown noted with disgust, “is straight out of Southern fiction. . . . Resignation to injustice is her creed.” She is, he went on to point out, “now infantile, now mature, now cataloguing folk-beliefs of the Southern Negro, and now cracking contemporary witticisms.”
White readers loved the novel. “Of course they had reasons,” Brown noted drily.
Even for a community habitually polite to its white supporters—“We are a polite people,” Hurston always said—Delilah was too much. All the more so because she was popular with whites. “I have heard dialect all my life, but I have yet to hear such a line as ‘She am an angel,’” Sterling Brown noted. She is the “old stereotype of the contented Mammy, and the tragic mulatto; and the ancient ideas about the mixture of the races.”
Langston Hughes was friends with Hurst. But he could not hold back. He made an example of Hurst’s novel in his Limitations of Life, one of four satiric skits he wrote for the Harlem Suitcase Theatre lampooning white imitations of blacks. Reversing the racial roles and using variations of the names of the lead actresses in Stahl’s 1934 blockbuster movie made from the novel, Hughes had blond Audette rub Mammy Weavers’s feet, promise never to leave her, and gaze at her mistress “like a faithful dog”: “I never gets tired doin’ for you,” Audette intoned.
Hurst’s use of the passing story, so central to Harlem Renaissance thinking about identity, was viewed as the trespass that Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Libby Holman’s blackface “Moanin’ Low,” and even most of the white plays about black life were not. Objecting to Hurst’s novel, “the ‘passing’ episodes are . . . unbelievable. . . . [Peola] never quite gets a grasp of the whole problem,” Brown wrote. Hurst thought Brown should have been more grateful for the attention she gave to blacks. “I cannot imagine what in the world I have to be grateful for,” Brown replied.
Racial passing was serious business in the 1920s and 1930s, when mainstream newspapers, taking for granted that it was unethical, advised white readers about how to detect black blood. In the public imagination, the passer was a moral criminal, trying to impersonate what she or she was not and, at the same time, betraying his or her true nature. But in the hands of black writers such as Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, passing was a moral victory. For them, the moral force of passing indicted society’s unfair lines, not the passer who crossed them. For Harlemites, “there was no story more compelling than the story of a black person who passes for white.” Indeed, the passing story provided an occasion in black fiction for whites to be comically portrayed—they are either duped by passers or panicked needlessly about them—and for blacks to be heroes. A victim of racism, the passer is forced across the color line, in black fiction, by discrimination and prejudice, which his or her passing reveals. Black fiction also used passing to question the idea that race is a biological essence or identity in the blood. As Paul Gilroy put it, passing puts “rooted identity . . . that most precious commodity . . . in grave jeopardy.”
Hurst’s narrative logic, however, got every piece of that crucial political formula wrong. She punished Peola for what society had done to her. She failed to treat Peola’s passing as a reasonable response to prejudice, let alone an act of valor. She made Peola a villain, rather than a victim, charging her with the responsibility for her mother’s collapse. Nor did Hurst understand the genre’s “moment of regret” that always turned society’s preference for whiteness upside down. Hurst’s Peola prefers white society. She experiences no longing for blackness, no wish for a return, none of the “wild desire” to go home that drives Nella Larsen’s passing character almost to madness. Peola never looks back, never misses blackness, never finds a single thing from her black life for which she longs or even feels nostalgic. A cruel daughter who breaks her mother’s heart, Peola is pure perpetrator.
Peola’s lack of feeling for blackness betrays her author’s attitudes. Though known for her sentimental writing, Hurst was remarkably unsentimental. She saw no particular value to racial identity unless it provided story material. Because the story of passing is, at its core, a tale of racial longing (for the black identity left behind), Hurst’s story falls flat. Imitation of Life cannot imagine racial longing. In place of a black erotics of identity, it shores up Delilah’s old-fashioned view that we must be as “Lordagawd” made us. A lifelong self-fashioner, Hurst drew the line at black self-creation, perhaps because she could not imagine racial longing of any type. Her novel was a special disappointment to a community deeply invested in the rich emotional potential of racial identity and deeply investe
d, as well, in expectations of its Negrotarians.
Many Harlemites joined the fracas over Imitation of Life in 1933 and 1934 when the first film version of the novel appeared. But Hurston kept her peace. Although she supported Hurst in private letters, she refrained from saying a word in public. Hurston must have seen, and perhaps hoped that others would not notice, that Delilah was only half Aunt Jemima. Hurst’s Delilah was also half Hurston, or rather half what Hurst perceived to be Hurston’s racial nature. She was painfully aware of the traits Hurst prized in her: “childlike manner . . . no great profundities but dancing perceptions . . . sense of humor,” and delightful “fund of folklore.” The lack of “indignation” and “insensibility” to racial slights, which Hurst imagined she saw in Hurston, were precisely the materials out of which Delilah was created. She was a “margarine Negro,” as Hurston called white-authored black caricatures, a figure built in Hurst’s image of Hurston, an insult at every level and, perhaps, Hurst’s retaliation for Hurston’s refusal to help.
Yet, Hurst evidently did not expect a black backlash. She was “stunned when she found her best-selling novel Imitation of Life the subject of fierce debate and parody” and “horrified by the sharp criticism” in Opportunity. Her novel probably had a profound effect on how the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance viewed friendship with whites and the possibilities of interracial intimacy. But there were few, if any, other direct consequences for Hurst, insulated by her own status, to face. She continued to count both Hughes and Hurston as lifelong friends, staying in touch with Hurston well into the 1940s, though it would always be Hurston’s “Dear Miss Hurst” to Hurst’s “Dear Zora.” She continued to be invited onto the advisory boards of black organizations. She remained a regular attendee of Harlem’s storied interracial parties, cabarets, and literary salons. To her great delight, she was promoted to national spokesperson for race, credited with having an inside view of blacks. Such venerable publications as The New York Times asked her to tell readers all about “the other, and unknown, Harlem,” handing her a podium that some whites, such as Nancy Cunard, in her essay “Harlem Reviewed,” would have to struggle to construct. Nothing that followed the novel forced Hurst to take responsibility for its racial slights.
Just after Imitation of Life appeared, Hurston wrote an essay entitled “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” perhaps her most forceful statement about how much white writers get wrong when they try to write about blacks. Their writings, she argued, “made out they were holding a looking-glass to the Negro [but] had everything in them except Negroness.” Without naming Hurst, Hurston’s essay addressed every flaw of Hurst’s novel, from its minstrel-ridden use of dialect and malapropisms to its treatment of Peola. “If a villain is needed” in a white novel, Hurston noted, white writers just “go catch a mulatto . . . yaller niggers being all and always wrong.” Those “margarine Negroes,” Hurston went on, are found especially in “popular magazines”: Fannie Hurst’s primary outlet. Hurston listed the white writers she called “earnest seekers”: DuBose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, T. S. Stribling, and Paul Green. Fannie Hurst was not included. It was high time, Hurston argued, for white writers to earn the privilege of writing about blacks. “Go hard or go home,” she concluded angrily. Intended for The American Mercury, the essay was pulled at the last minute and never published. Possibly, Hurst never saw it.
Hurston tried again, and Hurst certainly saw Hurston’s essay “The Pet Negro System,” published in 1943. Written as a mock sermon, the essay takes a mock document called The Book of Dixie as its text:
And every white man shall be allowed to pet himself a Negro. Yea, he shall take a black man unto himself to pet and to cherish and this same Negro shall be perfect in his sight. Nor shall hatred among the races of men, nor conditions of strife in the walled cities, cause his pride and pleasure in his own Negro to wane.
The “Pet Negro,” Hurston explained, “is someone whom a particular white person or persons wants to have and to do all the things forbidden to other Negroes”; by pointing to his or her pet, the white person decries outside criticism. Even if she’s a troublemaker and difficult—as pets often are—talking back to him and refusing to do all he asks, he’s only too happy to heap rewards on her, privileges foreclosed to all other blacks. Again, Hurston did not name Fannie Hurst. She did not need to. All of Harlem had known of her friendship with Hurst.
And Hurst certainly would have been familiar with Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, with its suggestion that trying to speak across the racial divide, or develop any meaningful friendships with whites, is as much a waste of time as “letting the moon shine” down your throat.
Hurst’s repeated insistence on “un-selfconsciousness” about race applied only to blacks. She did not believe it did—or should—apply to her. Her demand for “color blindness” was a one-way street, what Patricia Williams calls a “false luxury” that pretends that what matters a great deal does not matter at all. Feeling little for either whiteness or blackness, Hurst allowed herself to be intellectually fascinated with blackness while whiteness went unexamined. That kind of unself-consciousness about race is fundamental to what George Lipsitz calls the “possessive investment in whiteness”: the privilege of not seeing oneself, if white, as raced, and the idea that one’s own whiteness is a neutral default, nothing more than the way things are. Music and literary critic Baz Dreisinger, one of the few academics to write about “reverse” racial passing, suggests that we can differentiate “admirable” white identifications with blackness from “onerous” ones by the presence or absence of a self-critical distance. Hurst’s own background might have given her the distance Dreisinger describes. As a Jew, she was not considered entirely white. The closer she came to blackness, however, the whiter she became. Had she taken more note of that phenomenon, as well as taking professional advantage of it, her story of identities crossed and recrossed would have been richer.
Whereas Lillian Wood, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Charlotte Osgood Mason all confounded available ideas of race and identity, whether meaning to or not, Fannie Hurst, by and large, affirmed the status quo. The fact that Hurst could so easily avoid any consequences for that failure makes what other white women—from Lillian Wood to Nancy Cunard—willingly incurred for their transgressions all the more remarkable. Hurst’s failure of even her own liberal ideals serves as a painful reminder of how unpredictable—even to herself—Miss Anne’s involvement could be.
Chapter 8
Nancy Cunard: “I Speak as If I Were a Negro Myself”
Maybe I was African one time.
—Nancy Cunard
I longed for an American white friend with feelings such as mine—but alas, nary a one.
—Nancy Cunard
On a mild, cloudy Monday, May 2, 1932, Nancy Cunard returned to Harlem from a weekend in Boston, surprised to discover that William Randolph Hearst’s tabloid, the New York Daily Mirror, was stirring up a media frenzy with claims that “Steamship Heiress Nancy Cunard” and actor Paul Robeson were holed up at Harlem’s all-black Hotel Grampion. By dint of constant re-creation that few others would have dared, British Nancy Cunard had transformed herself from a “popular society girl” into an internationally known militant—simultaneously a modern icon of style and a model for rebels and radicals. Although only thirty-six years old, she had already endured (and sometimes enjoyed) nearly twenty years of minute tabloid attention from the British papers, which reported gleefully on all of her comings and goings as well as her hats, suits, jewelry, and makeup: “a mauve tulle scarf tied across her eyebrows, with floating ends, under a big gray felt hat, which looked, oh, so Spanish!” The Daily Mirror’s tale of an affair with the handsome, dynamic Robeson—himself an icon of Harlem’s “New Negro” masculinity—was just the sort of overagitated reporting Nancy loved to hate (and paste into her enormous black scrapbooks). Except for one thing. Almost every detail of the Daily Mirror’s story was wrong.
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Nancy Cunard liked this photo of herself from the 1920s and kept it with her in her scrapbook.
Nancy Cunard was not new to Harlem. She was there for the second time and well on her way to becoming one of the most important and influential white women in Harlem—possibly the most influential. She was tired of being just a famous flapper. Now she was angling for acceptance by blacks. It was no time to have her political and aesthetic contributions trivialized or misreported.
Robeson’s white lover was not Nancy but another Englishwoman named Yolande Jackson. And Nancy’s black lover was not Robeson but the elusive black jazz musician Henry Crowder, who had accompanied her from Paris to Harlem the year before but this time had stayed behind. Robeson and Nancy hardly knew each other. And Nancy was in New York for business, not pleasure: fighting for the release of the nine black “Scottsboro Boys” and also collecting material for a comprehensive anthology of black life eventually published as Negro: An Anthology. She also had written an insider’s account of Harlem, which was about to be published; that made it all the more infuriating—and ironic—to be portrayed as one of the cabaret-hopping, naive white tourists whom her forthcoming article was preparing to blast.
One of the few things the newspaper story got right was the fact that Nancy and Robeson were staying at the same hotel, hardly surprising given that the Grampion was the only first-rate hotel in Harlem that admitted black guests. Nancy learned that Robeson was also at the Grampion by reading the Daily Mirror’s account. Had she known he was there, she would have sought him out and demanded to know why he was ignoring her repeated requests for a contribution to her anthology. She hated being ignored.