Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources Sample of Conference Paper

Craig White, University of Houston-Clear Lake

National Association of African American Scholars Conference 1995

Harlem Renaissance: Blackness Reborn

            Like the most creative and expansive periods of Europe and the early United States, African America's greatest movement in literature and culture is a renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s shares paradigms of history and culture with the European Renaissance starting in the fifteenth century and with the American Renaissance before the Civil War. The literature of Harlem, however, reverses these earlier movements' most fundamental values: where European artists and their American descendants typically show beauty as a progress from darkness to light, Harlem Renaissance writers turn that narrative around to prophesy a Black Aesthetic. Developing a photographic negative of the white world Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes journey from light to a positive identity in darkness.

            Researchers of these periods typically mystify the word they share—renaissance—as a "flowering" or an "awakening" of national consciousness. If we take this keyword apart, however, so that "re-naissance" translates as "re-birth," it tells a story that is shared by Europe, early America, and Harlem. Five hundred years ago, for instance, Europe gave "rebirth" to the enlightened humanism that—if we're willing to bracket the controversy over Black Athena—was born in ancient Greece and Rome. This light of western civilization was again reborn in the antebellum American Renaissance, when Boston regarded itself as a new Athens and New York acted like Rome. Less than a century later, African America renews the paradigm of Renaissance history but declares a different value; instead of a rebirth of light, the Harlem Renaissance embodies—in Patricia Taylor's phrase—a "rebirth of blackness" (91).

            If history is made by people on the move, each of these renaissances shared a definite historical pattern, as large populations relocated from farms or villages to cities. Meeting in cities, formerly-isolated artists and intellectuals could exchange ideas and share survival techniques. In early modern Europe, for instance, Renaissance city-states like Rome and Florence rapidly grew in population and prominence, attracting far-flung figures like Michelangelo and Leonardo to rekindle the light that nearly went out during the so-called Dark Ages. Likewise in the American Renaissance of the 1840s and 50s, people fled the primitive darkness of the rural frontier for the city of lights, and publishing cliques and writers' clubs of old New York and Boston gathered figures as diverse as Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville to share and create an early American identity in the European tradition.

            Early in our own century African Americans migrated en masse from the rural South to the cities of the North, similarly uniting their diverse experiences into the voice of one people. This "urbanization of black America," according to Cary Wintz in Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (1988), constitutes the "central experience of American blacks in the early twentieth century" (10). Alain Locke, in the middle of it all in 1925, remarked that the "movement of the Negro" represented "a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern"--from a continuing middle passage where talent languished in isolation to a Renaissance where genius formed a partnership (6).

            Of the North's magnet cities, it was New York and especially the borough of Harlem that became, in James Weldon Johnson's words, the "culture center" for "the enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the whole Negro world" (301). As a young man, Langston Hughes remembered, "I wanted to see Harlem, the greatest Negro city in the world" (in Huggins, 24). Like other Renaissance cities, Harlem, Locke wrote, "brought together" into "common consciousness" the "student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker"; like the urban pilgrims of earlier cultural movements, these artists' "greatest experience [was to find] one another [in] a common area of contact and interaction" (6).

            Thus Harlem hosted a rebirth of the African diaspora in the New World. Its economic base, however, resembled those that emerged during the European and American Renaissances. In fact, all three movements arose during periods of explosive economic growth, which in early modern Europe resulted from international banking, colonization, and trade; in America before the Civil War, prosperity grew with Manifest Destiny and urban consumerism; and the Harlem Renaissance rose during the economic boom popularly known as the Roaring Twenties.

            In such times, artists live off the fat of the land, but newly rich patrons and audiences can also frustrate the ambitions of artists and writers. In the European Renaissance, changing Popes moved Michelangelo from one unfinished work to another and stymied his favorite projects. In the American Renaissance, writers and artists strove to create noble art for the "Common Man," which led to a new dilemma, expressed by Melville in a letter to Hawthorne in which he anticipated the commercial failure of his great intellectual adventure, Moby-Dick: "Dollars damn me," Melville wrote. "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, . . . write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches" (2145).

            Writers of the Harlem Renaissance combined European-style patronage and the American marketplace to finance their careers, but such arrangements were further complicated by the wild card of cross-cultural exchange. The literary historian Nathan Irvin Huggins observes that the Harlem Renaissance was "as much a white creation as . . . a black," involving a "symbiotic . . . interdependence" (84). This commerce between people of different colors added another layer to the predicament Melville found in the book market: Harlem writers wanting a return on their labor sometimes found it necessary to indulge a "vogue in black primitivism [that] encouraged the commercial press to patronize black writers"; consequently, Huggins continues, "the significant barometer" of publishing success for the Harlem Renaissance turned out to be not the black writer's desire but "the white reading public's taste" (127).

            Similar quandaries came about when wealthy white patrons supported Harlem Renaissance writers. At one time Zora Neale Hurston, Louise Thompson, and Langston Hughes shared lodging and allowances provided by a Park Avenue magnate's wife whose love for "the primitive" simultaneously helped these writers keep working and threatened the range of their expression (Huggins 129). Hurston, who as a child in Florida had entertained white tourists with songs, dances, and stories, gratified her "godmother['s]" pleasure in "darky" stories, but Thompson chafed at such expectations and soon left the arrangement. Hughes appears to have been genuinely fond of his patron, but he had to cut the purse strings himself when she tried to stop him from publishing a poem that satirized white appetites for black cuisine and culture (Huggins 130-35).

            Each renaissance thus involves historical patterns of urbanization and conflicts between artists and their audiences or patrons, but the Harlem Renaissance's special paradox between black expression and white support also keys a unique aesthetic, whose terms also appear in western history: before the European Renaissance, that culture endured the Dark Ages; after the Renaissance dawns the Enlightenment. Addison Gayle, Jr. in his indictment of "the White Aesthetic" points out that beginning with Plato, for "most of the history of the Western World, [white] aestheticians . . . have defined beauty in terms of whiteness" (41). Early in Europe's Renaissance, for instance, Dante begins his Divine Comedy in a "dark forest" with "darkened air," but he follows Beatrice's "eyes of light" to heaven, where God appears as a central "point of light," "glow[ing] most luminous" (Inferno I, II; Paradiso XXVIII). Likewise in the American Renaissance, Melville in his novella Billy Budd sees darkness as evil when he describes the villain Claggart as having a "complexion . . . tinged with a faint shade of amber"; at the opposite end of this moral and aesthetic spectrum is the fair-haired Billy, whose heroic death is bathed in light, as a "vapory fleece hanging low in the East [is] shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision" (2314, 2350).

            In its many variations on this theme of darkness giving way to light, western literature sometimes involves the difference of African descent. A century ago, for instance, Africa was given the name, "the dark continent," and the implication of skin color in such attributions seems evident in titles of books written by that famous European explorer of Africa, Henry Morton Stanley--the one who said, "Dr. Livingston, I presume." Stanley's 1878 book, Through the Dark Continent, coined the phrase; it was followed in 1890 by In Darkest Africa; and his series concluded in 1893 with My Dark Companions and their Strange Stories. The self-evident equation is that if Africa and Africans are "dark," their stories are "strange."

            Indeed, when American writers of African descent gain an approximation of their own voice in Harlem, they `make strange' or defamiliarize Europeans' code of darkness and light by reversing the poles of value toward a black aesthetic; instead of growing from negative darkness to positive light, these writers chart a passage through painful light to a comforting identity in darkness. For Zora Neale Hurston in "How It Feels to be Colored Me," this new value for the self develops in contrast: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background" (1436); and in Their Eyes Were Watching God, though Janie first sees herself as "a blossoming pear tree" on a "spring afternoon," she learns the truth of her life only when "the night time put[s] on flesh and darkness" (8, 10).

            "[F]lesh and darkness": however, African Americans may also find identity with darkness through political and economic history. American slaves, after toiling all day under a bright sun and a white boss, had no choice but to take back the night: Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of the Life of an American Slave could "not recollect of ever seeing my own mother by the light of day": "She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone" (1882). Truth that hides from light and thrives in darkness also appears in the European American gothic tradition; however, the enclosed and unregenerate darknesses drawn by writers like Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner appear quite different from the landscapes of freedom and knowledge that later African American writers discover when the sun goes down. Especially in the canon of the Harlem Renaissance, the self emerges in darkness too insistently and powerfully to attribute solely to gothic imitations or to patron-pleasing primitivism.

            The richest lode for this paradigm is found in the movement's lyrical writing. Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) gloams with "evening folk-song[s]," as when "Dusk hid[es]" the woman called "Fern" but liberates "her song" (27, 32). Likewise "Georgia Dusk" calls up African "Race memories" only after "The sky . . . passively darkens" (ll. 18-19, 4).

            Likewise Hughes's "Mother to Son" finds truth in darkness, as its speaker recalls "sometimes goin' in the dark / Where there ain't been no light" (ll. 12-13). His poem "Mulatto" opens by placing the speaker's father, a "white man," against the "Georgia Dusk" and "Southern Night" (ll. 1, 2, 8); reversing the poles of light and dark, however, the speaker is asked, "What's the body of your mother?" and told to "Get on back there in the night," the "nigger night" (ll. 21, 37, 41, original emphases).

            Hughes narrates this transposition of values more positively in "Dream Variations." The poem opens in daylight, inspiring a frenzied determination to survive the glare:

            To fling my arms wide

            In some place of the sun,

            To whirl and to dance

            Till the white day is done. (ll. 1-4)

Of this poem Huggins observes, "doubtless white men and the white world are the day and the sun" (68); at length, however, the speaker escapes this hot, white, chaotic stimulation, coming to "rest at cool evening,/ Beneath a tall tree / While night comes on gently, / . . . . Black like me" (Hughes ll. 5-7, 17).

            Of all the black and beautiful poets of the Harlem Renaissance, none felt the alternating attractions of African-American and European-American identity as selfconsciously as Countee Cullen, who "marvel[ed] at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" ("Yet Do I Marvel," ll. 13-14). In "From the Dark Tower," he suggests the dark power that drives the movement's quest for identity by singing of "buds that cannot bloom at all / In light" (ll. 11-12). In another stanza, however, light and darkness share a relational value:

            The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,

            White stars is no less lovely being dark . . . . (9-10)

Like Hurston's "feel[ing] most colored when . . . thrown against a sharp white background," Cullen's "sable breast" of "night" does not negate or obstruct those "[w]hite stars" but creates a "relie[f]," a differential field in which neither light nor darkness can be seen without the benefit of the other.

            White and black history and poetry thus renew and refashion the narrative of beauty reborn. Unfortunately for the Roaring Twenties and the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression begins on the day white history calls Black Tuesday. The sudden loss of economic growth and patronage scatters Harlem's writers and halts for a moment their subversive narrative. "So in the dark," Cullen concludes, "we hide the heart that bleeds, / And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds" (ll. 13-14).

            The seeds of darkness bear fruit. In the next generation, the international movement called Negritude affirms black identity and questions white assimilation. In the urban activism and economic growth of the sixties, "Black is Beautiful," giving rise to the Black Aesthetic. Historicized, the Harlem Renaissance demystifies and deepens western values; poeticized, western history grants the Harlem Renaissance as much as it gives any group of artists: a few years to do some good work. As children of the Renaissance--European, American, Harlem--we can learn to bear the light and not to fear the dark by admitting what we share and admiring how we differ.

Works Cited

Baym, Nina, et al. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 3d ed. v. 1 & 2. NY: W. W. Norton, 1989.

Cullen, Countee. "From the Dark Tower." 1927; rptd in Baym, 2: 1760-61.

---. "Yet Do I Marvel." 1925; rptd in Baym, 2: 1757.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. trans. Laurence Binyon. The Portable Dante. Ed. Paolo Milano. NY: Viking, 1947.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845; rptd in Baym, 1: 1873-1938.

Gayle, Addison, Jr. "Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic." in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Gayle. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. NY: Oxford UP, 1971.

Hughes, Langston. "Dream Variations." 1924; rptd in Baym, 2: 1738.

---. "Mother to Son." 1922; rptd in Baym, 2: 1737.

---. "Mulatto." 1927; rptd in Baym, 2: 1738-39.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to be Colored Me." 1928; rptd in Baym, 2: 1435-1438.

---. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. NY: Perennial, 1990.

Johnson, James Weldon. "Harlem: the Culture Capital." In Locke, ed. The New Negro: 301-311.

Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. NY: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925; rptd NY: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968.

Locke, Alain. "The New Negro." In The New Negro: 3-16.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd. 1891; rptd in Baym, 1: 2300-2355.

Taylor, Patricia E. "Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, 1921-1931: Major Events and Publications." In Arna Bontemps, ed. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. NY: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1972: 90-102.

Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. NY: Liveright, 1951.

Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston: Rice UP, 1988.