“Sykes, what you throw dat whip on me like dat? You know it would skeer me — looks just like a snake, an’ you knows how skeered Ah is of snakes.”
Two Poems from FIRE!! A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists
LITTLE CINDERELLA
Look me over, kid!
I knows I’m neat —
Little Cinderella from head to feet.
Drinks all night at Club Alabam, —
What comes next I don’t give a damn!
Daddy, daddy,
You sho’ looks keen!
I likes men that are long and lean.
Broad street ain’t got no brighter lights
Than your eyes at pitch midnight.
— LEWIS ALEXANDER
JUNGLE TASTE
There is a coarseness
In the songs of black men
Coarse as the songs
Of the sea.
There is a weird strangeness
In the songs of black men
Which sounds not strange
To me.
There is beauty
In the faces of black women,
Jungle beauty
And mystery.
Dark, hidden beauty
In the faces of black women
Which only black men
See.
— EDWARD SILVERA
A year later Langston Hughes boldly articulated this new literature’s aim to portray “authentic” views of black life:
[I]t is the duty of the younger Negro artist . . . to change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspiration of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro — and beautiful!” . . . We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. . . . We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. . . . We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
In this article, which appeared in the Nation magazine, Hughes voiced the sentiment that a generation later would become a rallying cry for black consciousness: “Black is beautiful.” The blossoming of that pride added fuel to the fire that crackled in Harlem after the renaissance had officially begun.
THREE FIGURES TO EMERGE OUT OF THE FIRE
WALLACE THURMAN
ALTHOUGH HE DIED young, Wallace Thurman was not simply a cheerleader for black writers but a vocal critic and theorist who promoted controversial themes. Thurman was born August 16, 1902, in Salt Lake City. His father, Oscar Thurman, played no role in his childhood, having abandoned the family for California. Though his mother, Beulah, was present, the most important person for him was his maternal grandmother, Emma “Ma Jack” Jackson, to whom he dedicated his first novel, The Blacker the Berry. Thurman grew up nervous and sickly but very devoted to books and movies. His reading ranged far and wide, including Dostoyevsky, Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare. He attended the University of Utah and then the University of Southern California, but he did not complete a degree. By 1923 he was working in the Los Angeles post office but was driven by greater literary ambitions. He tried to publish a short-lived literary magazine and organized a literary group comparable to what was happening in Harlem. In August of 1925, however, he abandoned Los Angeles for Harlem, where he quickly established himself as a rising star. He worked at a number of African-American newspapers and ended up as managing editor of The Messenger. Thurman and Langston Hughes roomed together and collaborated on the literary magazine FIRE!! The foreword declared that this publication intended to weave “vivid, hot designs upon an ebony bordered loom and . . . satisfy pagan thirst for beauty unadorned.” At the time, the magazine was ignored by critics, but later FIRE!! became recognized as one of the most influential publications of the period in terms of artistic merit. Nevertheless, it was a financial disaster, and when the building that stored the copies of the magazine burned down, FIRE!! literally went up in smoke. Thurman’s own salary was ultimately tapped to pay the $1000 debt ($10,340 in today’s dollars).
Wallace Thurman, 1902–1934
Undaunted by failure, Thurman decided to launch a new project as editor of Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life. Harlem was published in November of 1928. This magazine was meant to be different from FIRE!!, in that it would contain both racial and nonracial subject matter. It suffered, however, the same fate as did FIRE!! and went under. At this point a discouraged Thurman turned to playwriting, and with William Jourdan Rapp he wrote Harlem, which was based on Thurman’s short story in FIRE!! The play brought the rent party and the Harlem numbers racket to Broadway and was a critical and financial success downtown. In 1929 Thurman’s first novel, The Blacker the Berry, was published. The novel is about a young woman’s struggle with racism both in the black community and beyond. His next novel, Infants of the Spring, appeared in 1932 and is a scathing indictment of the Harlem Renaissance. By this time, however, Thurman’s drinking and depression were growing worse and worse. His last novel, The Interne, was a collaboration with A. L. Furman and was a sort of exposé of the medical profession. The book was panned by critics. Around this time he moved to Hollywood to write screenplays. His script Tomorrow’s Children was produced in 1934. In May of 1934, he returned to Harlem and collapsed at a party shortly thereafter. On December 21 he died of tuberculosis at age 32. His screenplay High School Girls was produced in 1935. Both of his films were ignored. Thurman’s legacy was his fearlessness in the face of opposition and indifference by both blacks and whites. He was one of the pioneers of unflinchingly authentic themes that led the way for the next generation of writers.
LANGSTON HUGHES
THE MOST IMPORTANT poet to emerge from the renaissance, Langston Hughes was also a member of one of black America’s most respected families. His maternal grandfather was one of the band of men who joined John Brown in his raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. The raid was a desperate attempt to ignite an insurgency that would free Southern slaves. Hughes’s grandmother wore his grandfather’s bullet-ridden shawl every day of her remaining life. Amid this legacy James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902. His mother, Carrie Langston Hughes, had been a schoolteacher; his father, James Nathaniel Hughes, was a lawyer and moved to Mexico out of frustration while his son was still an infant. Langston Hughes was raised primarily by his grandmother, Mary Langston. As a teen Hughes moved in with his mother in Illinois after she remarried. Upon graduation from an integrated high school in Cleveland, he moved to Mexico with his father and spent a year teaching there. In 1921 he returned to the United States, and a few months after his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” appeared in the June 1921 issue of the Crisis, Hughes began attending Columbia University. After a year in school Hughes left to work in New York, on transatlantic ships, and in Paris until 1925.
While working as a busboy in Washington, D.C., Hughes slipped three poems beside poet and editor Vachel Lindsay’s plate. Lindsay was impressed enough to promote Hughes to influential editors. In 1925 Hughes won the Opportunity literary contest, and his first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926. Hughes was one of the few black writers who was able to support himself financially by writing, but not until well into middle age. He published poems, stories, screenplays, articles, children’s books, and songs during his lifetime. He spent much of his life promoting black writers by compiling anthologies of African-American poetry. He received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1960 and was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961. He died of congestive heart failure in New York City on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65.
Langston Hughes 1902–1967
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
ONE OF THE first to collect African-American folklore, Hurston was both an acclaimed anthropologist and novelist. According to the genealogy recorded in the Hurston family Bible, Zora Neale Hurston was born January 15, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. She was raised
in America’s first all-black incorporated town, Eatonville, Florida. Her father, John Hurston, was a carpenter, preacher, and three-term mayor in Eatonville. Her mother, Lucy Hurston, died in 1904, after which Zora was sent away to school. In 1917 she began studies at Morgan Academy in Baltimore and in 1918 attended Howard University, where her first short story appeared in the college literary magazine. She later won a scholarship to Barnard College to study with the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas.
Zora Neale Hurston, 1891–1960
In New York, Hurston was secretary to a bestselling novelist of the time, Fannie Hurst, and was a major force in the Harlem Renaissance. She was associate publisher of the avant-garde journal FIRE!! and collaborated with a number of writers on several plays, including Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, written with Langston Hughes. Hurston traveled through the South, as well as Latin American countries and Jamaica, to collect folklore. The tales were collected into two books, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). Her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, appeared in 1934 and is based on the lives of her parents in Eatonville. Her most acclaimed novel, Their EyesWere Watching God, was published in 1937 and was written after a failed love affair. The novel explores a middle-aged woman’s journey toward self-realization in a sexist society. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, won the 1943 Annisfield Award. Her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, was her only work to include white protagonists. During her later years she worked as a maid and wrote for a number of magazines, but her increasing conservatism isolated her from her peers. She died on January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Harlem at Night, Winold Reiss.
DARK
TOWER
A SOCIAL BREAKTHROUGH
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame
Yesterday, a night-gone thing
A sun-down name.
And Dawn today
Broad arch above the road we came.
We march!
— LANGSTON HUGHES
ENTER THE NEW NEGRO
THE MARCH WAS ON! Blacks from all walks of life were strutting, vest buttons bursting, with optimism. This emerging era was the Age of the “New Negro,” and it promised new opportunity and respect for blacks in America. Critic Alain Locke described this new way of thinking in his essay “Enter the New Negro,” which was included in the celebrated March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic. Here, Locke makes the distinction between how African Americans used to be viewed and how that view was changing.
HARLEM JIVE
from The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era
Ah-ah. A fool.
Ain’t got ’em. Has no virtue; is of no value.
Bardacious. Wonderful; marvelous.
Belly rub. Sexy dance.
Berries. An expression of approval, as in, “She’s the berries.”
Boogie-woogie. A kind of dancing.
Bookooing. Showing off (from beaucoup).
Bottle it, bottle et. Shut up.
Brick-presser. An idler.
Bring mud. To disappoint.
Buckra. A white person.
Bull-skating. Bragging.
Bump, bumpty-bump, bump the bump. A slow, one-step dance.
Catch the air. To leave under pressure.
Chip. To steal.
Cloakers. Deceivers; liars.
Collar a hot. To eat a meal.
Collar a nod. To sleep.
Cut. To do something well.
[F]or generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being — a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. . . . His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality. Though having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has had to subscribe to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation. . . .
Therefore the Negro to-day wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not. He resents being spoken of as a social ward or minor, even by his own, and to being regarded as a chronic patient for the sociological clinic, the sick man of American Democracy. . . .
And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.
As Locke and others spoke of a “renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart,” the community of Harlem as a whole went about celebrating the coming of this new age. In every corner of life — from kitchen mechanics to heiresses, from laborers to poets, from pot wrestlers to preachers — the vibe was hot. No matter what came down the road, they were optimistic that everything was going to be all right.
Get ’way back, and snap your fingers,
get over Sally, one and all,
grab your gal, and don’t you linger
do that slow drag ’round the hall
do that step,
the “Texas Tommy” drop,
like you’re sitting on a log,
rise slow, that will show,
the dance called the dog.
— from “Walkin’ the Dog” by Shelton Brooks, 1916
“TOO TERRIBLE PARTY”
ON ALMOST EVERY block in the poorer sections of town a tradition that originated in Southern cities became “Harlemized” — the rent party. The rents in Harlem were outrageous. By the mid-1920s a Harlem apartment could rent for as much as $25 a month more than a similar place in another section of the city. For blacks, that meant sometimes spending more than half one’s salary on rent. The solution was not taking on another job, as most had done in the past. Instead, people would throw parties and charge admission to raise the extra money. Apartment dwellers throwing a rent party could expect to make $25 ($257 in today’s dollars) from a hundred guests each paying twenty-five cents admission, as well as money from selling sandwiches and alcohol. After paying for the piano player, chair and piano rental, and food, the hosts were able to put away a sizeable nut toward that month’s rent. This creative kind of problem solving represented a seismic change in attitude. A marvelous description of “what to do when the rent comes due” was published in Charles S. Johnson’s anthology Ebony and Topaz. “Mrs. Bailey Pays the Rent,” by Ira De A. Reid, offers a glimpse of a typical rent party.
There has been an evolution in the eclat of the rent party since it has become “Harlemized.” The people have seen a new light, and are no longer wont to have it go unnamed. They called it a “Parlor Social.” That term, however, along with “Rent Party” is for the spoken word. “Social Whist Party” looks much better in print and has become the prevailing terminology. Nor is its name restricted to these. Others include “Social Party,” “Too Terrible Party,” “Too Bad Party,” “Matinee Party,” “Parlor Social,” “Whist Party,” and “Social Entertainment.”
There straggles along the cross-town streets of North Harlem a familiar figure. A middle aged white man, bent from his labor as the Wayside Printer, is pushing a little cart which has all of the equipment necessary for setting up the rent party ticket. The familiar tinkle of his bell in the late afternoon brings the representative of some family to his side. While you wait, he sets up your invitation with the bally-ho heading desired, and at a very reasonable price. The grammar and the English may be far from correct, but they meet all business requirements since they bring results. What work the Wayside printer does not get goes to the nearest print shop; some of which specialize in these announcements.
A true s
pecimen of the popular mind is expressed in these tickets. The heading may be an expression from a popular song, a slang phrase, a theatrical quip or “poetry.” A miscellaneous selection gives us the following: “Come and Get it Fixed”; “Leaving Me Papa, It’s Hard To Do Because mam Done Put That Thing On You”; “If You Can’t Hold Your Man, Don’t Cry After He’s Gone, Find Another”; “Clap Your Hands HereComes Charlie and He’s Bringing Your Dinah Too”; “Old Uncle Joe, the Jelly Roll King is Back in Town and is Shaking That Thing”; “Here I am Again. Who? Daddy Jelly Roll and His Jazz Hounds”; “It’s Too Bad Jim, But if You Want To Find a Sweet Georgia Brown, Come to the House of Mystery”; “You Don’t Get Nothing for Being an Angel Child, So you Might as Well Get Real Busy and Real Wild”.
H U R R A Y
COME AND SEE WHAT IS IN STORE FOR YOU AT THE
TEA CUP PARTY
GIVEN BY MRS. VANDERBILT SMITH
at 409 EDGECOMBE AVENUE NEW YORK CITY
Apartment 10-A
on Thursday evening, January 23rd, 1930
at 8:00 P.M.
ORIENTAL • GYPSY • SOUTHERN MAMMY • STARLIGHT
and other readers will be present
Music and Talent — — Refreshments Served
Fall in line, and watch your step, For there’ll be
Lots of Browns with plenty of Pep At
A Social Whist Party
Given by
Lucille & Minnie
149 West 117th Street, N.Y. Gr. floor, W,
Saturday Evening, Nov. 2nd 1929
Refreshments Just It Music Won’t Quit
If Sweet Mamma is running wild, and you are looking
for a Do-right child, just come around and
linger awhile at a
SOCIAL WHIST PARTY
GIVEN BY
PINKNEY & EPPS
260 West 129th Street Apartment 10
Harlem Stomp! Page 8