Week 5, entry one and two

Week 5, entry one

from Passing and The Fire in the Flint

Based on the excerpts, both Larsen’s Passing and White’s The Fire in the Flint, display two male physicians in different ways. Brian, Irene Redfield’s husband in Passing, is seen as a strong-willed physician frustrated by his professional growth. Brian principally acts in the excerpt as a means to understand Irene’s focus on sustaining the middle-class respectability she has found in Harlem. Kenneth Harper, the protagonist in The Fire in the Flint, exercises his solution to the race problem by bettering his own circumstances. While the introduction to the excerpt mentions a love of Kenneth’s she appears nowhere in the selected portions of The Fire in the Flint. While Jane Phillips, Kenneth’s love, is absent, his office is stocked with other females that work inversely to the relationship of Brian and Irene Redfield. The women in The Fire in the Flint excerpt¸ are there to express Kenneth’s belief that the racial issue would be resolved if all blacks could improve their situation.

The first two women introduced in the excerpt are Kenneth’s mother and Mamie. Both function as representatives on behalf of Kenneth’s practice, the vital networkers needed to introduce blacks in Georgia to Kenneth’s deft surgical skills. Kenneth’s mom is an astounding character in and of herself, an articulate women who managed to preserve her serenity while her son was in the North. The descriptions afforded to the two other doctors, Dr. Williams and Dr. Bennett, describe in a roundabout way the culture of the Georgia town where Kenneth practices. Williams affects almost a false intelligence and austerity, with his love of Latin words, and his refrain of the busy work schedule he keeps. He drives a shiny Ford, but levels the power distance between himself, the driver, and the onlookers, by raucously calling out to those on the streets. His arrival is more of a carnival than it is the serious, revered entrance of a dignified individual (which I think Williams wishes it was more the latter rather than the former). Dr. Bennett is proof of the durability of traditional Souther thinking, with nearly all descriptions of him or his buggy involving some passage of time. It was in this backdrop, traditional Southerners, black demagogues, that Kenneth’s mother lived those years without Kenneth. Mrs. Harper is an intermediary moving between the poor Georgian community and the highly educated office of Kenneth, a woman who can bridge blacks and their present circumstance and racial uplift.

Mrs. Johnson is another woman in Kenneth’s office who seems to represent the belief of Kenneth’s that skill, talent, and education translates to a desirable life. She held a respectable career as a nurse at a hospital, but now leads a domestic life with her husband in Central City. Addressing how one betters his individual circumstance is seen through Mrs. Johnson: skill, talent, and education.


Week 5, entry two

from “The Closing Door”

While reading Grimke’s “The Closing Door,” the fairest intertextual comparison seemed to be the work of Edgar Allen Poe, particularly “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The comparison between the two works attests to the social burdens that can drive the central characters to hysteria. The elements Poe outlined in pioneering and popularizing Gothic fiction are present in Grimke’s work: the narrator as a character (suggesting some unreliability), suspense, isolation, and finally hysteria resulting from some social ill.

The narrator’s relationship with Agnes shapes the retelling of the events, as she outlines from the beginning: “I wish I might show you Agnes Milton of those far off happy days” (Grimke, 487). The suspense arises also very early in the short story, arriving in the form of a bill with no accompanying service expectant of a bill. The characters are all charged something, but what charges them is unclear. Discovering that charge becomes integral to the denouement of the plot. The suspense is further heightened when the service they paid for, the telegram, arrives, reading only: “Bob died suddenly. Under no circumstances come. Father” (Grimke, 489). The weight of that news isolates the characters, because almost improbably Joe, Agnes’ brother and a reporter of the event, shows up shortly after the telegram. Agnes is removed to the kitchen to save her from any grisly news Joe may have while the narrator and her husband, Jim, remain in the scene to hear from Joe. The narrator and Jim make it a point to guard Agnes from any news, though she still hears it and faints.

Agnes and Roderick Usher both seem driven to hysteria by social forces outside their control. Agnes’ refrain, “I’m an instrument” serves to describe not only her but also Roderick. Roderick could not continue the revered Usher bloodline or withstand the pressure of that high society living. Agnes cannot make sense of the brutality and barbarism that racism begets. Rather than reproduce another instrument, Agnes kills her own child and to guarantee she produces no more tools, she kills herself. The death caused by the supernatural events in Poe’s story is matched by the death caused by the despair and resentment in Grimke’s work.

Week 4, entry two

Based on the excerpt I would want to read more of Nella Larsen’s Passing. Both Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry have upper-middle class privileges but feel unsatisfied. In addition to exploring those voids, a more complete picture of Clare Kendry could be provided given the full text. The excerpt seems very much about Irene, while only the foreword provided by the editor gives a sample of Kendry’s domestic life. Most of all, the full text would provide a complete picture of this urban gentility that draws from the Southern legacy.

Within Passing there is some remodeling of Southern gentility to fit Harlem. Specifically, this is the life Irene Redfield embraces, and the life she suspects Clare Kendry to be disrupting. The silence between Irene and her husband Brian mirrors the unspoken tension of those empty, arranged marriages in the South. Irene seeks to harbor her children within that gentility by marking the racial issue taboo.

This lifestyle affects both Irene and Brian. Brian feels frustrated that his professional growth has stagnated and seeks to move to Brazil. Meanwhile, the serenity and composure Irene affects, in the face of infidelity, makes her feel “years, not months, older” in the short time she suspects Brian’s affair. Harlem seems inhospitable to providing the systems that sustain this elitism Irene lives. The snowy and arid months match the despair pervading Irene’s relationship, which provides no recourse in the cool, temperate climates of the South. Her social network does not actively live the urban gentility life style, as Irene discovers Felise passing, which provides no recourse in the elaborate social networks evidenced in the South. Additionally, Irene seems to internally struggle with this lifestyle, as seen in her response to Clare’s value of money. Irene internalizes her response, feeling: “Her reason partly agreed, her instinct wholly rebelled” (Larsen, 463). This reason, logic, may have been constructed over the years of this privileged middle class life, while the instinct may be the sum of her experiences, the reminders of her skin color in a segregated United States.

Week 4, entry one

9/16 from Home to Harlem

“Are Jake and Ray rejecting society’s institutions or are they outside of them trying to find their way in?”

From the excerpt it would appear Jake and Ray are both rejecting at least part of their society’s institutions. Jake observes the energies of industrialized Pittsburgh, being consumed by them by being enveloped in a cloud of smoke from an incoming train, the wonderful metaphoric description of Wiley Avenue, with its bleak looking shops along an uphill street, shrugs, and says, “I don’t like its ‘pearance nohow” (McKay, 371). It’s a wonderful line that acknowledges the surface of things, seemingly making Jake look foolish, but pronouncing within Jake’s character there is a concerted effort to not get swept up in the grandiose import of his life—that “romance of being black” as Ray describes it in his mind. There seems some contentedness by Jake with his economical realities—why take satisfaction from what you purchase (the pie) when the woman selling it offers more succor? Why gamble when you already won enough money at it? For Jake, there is always some niche within his economic reality to detract from the hardships he does indeed face. Rather than sleep in a bug-ridden place, he goes out, has his share, and then comes back to the same squalid place to pass out. Jake’s actions defy society’s morally and intellectually edifying institutions, thereby rejecting them.

While Jake is accepting of his economic realities he seems hopelessly lost pinning down his social life and figuring out what he wants from that sphere. When he initially looks at the world of opium and drugs, that place with a separate threshold a part from the bar (almost signifying you are in some serious stuff if you walk through those doors into this new place), he seemingly rues: “It’s a great life ef youse in on it…” (McKay, 375). But Jake can’t seem to bring himself to accept all that comes with that life—only the casual drop in to scratch and old habit. I feel Jake recognizes the transience and fruitlessness in drug highs because they aren’t as “mahvelous” as Jake’s feelings. While Ray is conflicted with his intellect, Jake seems nagged by his emptiness. When he touches down in Harlem, instead of being enveloped by the energies of the city (no smoke this time!), he is forlorn over not having any woman to share this beautiful day with.

Ray’s character is harder to judge in terms of his rejection or seeking of society’s institutions. As we discussed in class, he seems afflicted with a sense of dignity. For that prestige to strike a man of Ray’s circumstances instills a sense of restlessness within Ray. Ray reads the weighty black publications, Ray talks like an educated person, Ray may have even gone to Howard University. Ray initially seems attempting to work his way into the social institutions. But it doesn’t seem by any accident that Ray and Jake first meet at what is described as a social nexus for low-lives and shop of ridiculous religious iconography, a pool hall on dirty Wiley Avenue. For all of Ray’s efforts this is where he finds himself. His frustration doesn’t seem to come ahead until the scene where he lies awake, begging to sleep, but kept awake by his conscience screaming at him for his social situation in the broader context of race relations. Ray seemingly throws in the towel by stealing Jake’s drugs. What troubled him became distorted: “Taboos and terrors and penalties were transformed into new pagan delights, orgies of Orient-blue carnival, of rare flowers and red fruits, cherubs and seraphs and fetishes and phalli and all the most-high gods…” (McKay, 379). And with that action, the “tuning in and dropping out” long before the 1960s ever happened, Ray got his sleep. The word “capitulate” I think is an interesting word choice. There are connotations of loss from the word’s definition of drawing up the terms of surrender.

Week 3, entry two

9/10 excerpt from Birthright

T. S. Stribling’s title appears a conscious selection devised to interplay with the predominant idea in white bohemia of the American black as the innocent primitive. As we discussed in class, several white artists used blacks and their culture as a means to comment on the broader culture of the United States. While Peter Siner contrasts Eugene O’Neill’s superstitious, bumbling Brutus Jones, the idea of racial uplift through atavism and rebirth surfaces in both texts. For Jones, as Robeson points out in his “Reflections on O’Neill’s Plays,” the character returns to a previous generation through his trek through the wilderness “throwing off one by one the layers of civilization until he returns to the primitive soil from which he (racially) came” (58). To me, the implication in atavism is that there is no reference to the direct preceding generation, but rather a link to the Romanticized ideal of ancestry. While Jones removes his clothing or rips it, becoming the primitive, Peter Siner seemingly takes on the layers of civilization, hanging his overcoat, suitcase, and hand-bag in the Jim Crowe car while sitting next to blacks in their military uniforms and other plain dress.

Both Jones and Siner appear reborn, conceived as varying portrayals of blacks by two different literary artists. Jones’ is an authentic atavism, a relationship with his ancestors, while Siner’s story surfaces little relationship to his ancestors, but rather an indication of the promising future to come for American blacks. Siner meditates on his ancestors, remarking: “He was coming back into the South, into his own country. Here for generations his forebears had toiled endlessly and fruitlessly…,” though he “shrugged away such thoughts and with a certain effort replaced them with the constructive idea that was bringing him South once more” (Stribling, 335).

Week 3, entry one

9/9 “Returning Soldiers” and “If We Must Die”

McKay’s poem and Dubois’ editorial both appear in 1919 as responses to the Red Summer, a time of indiscriminant attacks on black neighborhoods throughout the U.S. An interesting theme between the two works is the development of struggle and resistance. For Dubois’ returning soldiers, the men “fought in bitter resignation” for a country that despised blacks overtly and subtly. In Dubois’ piece there is a progression that begins with soldiers returning from fighting and ending with the returning soldiers and black community preparing to fight the next war for their equal rights. The enemies appear to be various systems, not necessarily any individual or mob.

McKay makes no explicit reference to the contributions of blacks during the World War I, but charges this current group of blacks in the U.S. and abroad to meet the common foe. McKay’s term “kinsmen” seemingly speaks to the pan-African identity cultivated by Harlem Renaissance artists and thinkers. The enemy are marauders—dogs, monsters, murderous, cowardly packs—individuals perhaps acting out the will of the system. Yet that is only an inference made, not a fact explicit by McKay’s poem. One of the descriptions of the condition of the attackers comes with their portrayal as mad and hungry. To me that is very interesting because how far removed are the blacks from that instance? Their anger may be different but their hunger, both literally and figuratively, may be very similar. This gets at the classicism discussed in class, moving the conversation beyond race to class. And from that portrayal there is a fair suggestion that some of the same systems denying blacks also inhibit poor whites.

In class we talked of “grandfather clauses,” but just to use the one outlined by Dubois, the southern cotton collective could be another example. White cotton farmers must contend with two forces: the price the market will bear, and the price to keep blacks out of that industry. Just from that, it appears it would be very difficult to profit from farming cotton.

Dubois, W. E. B. “Returning Soldiers.” Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering
Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994. 3-5.

McKay, C. “If We Must Die.” Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis.
New York: Penguin, 1994. 290

Reading Journal: Week 2

9/1 “Returning Soldiers”

With the lecture in mind, Dubois’s mentioning of France takes on several dimensions. The French recognized the black soldiers with high honors, which contrasted the disingenuous behavior by their own country, the United States. In several ways Dubois aligns the condition of blacks in the U.S. to that of France. Both a country and a race of people are bleeding, and there appears to be some kindred relationship.

While only mentioning “German race arrogance,” but enumerating the many awful hate crimes against blacks in the U.S., Dubois links the enemy in the First World War to racism (Dubois 4). He closes the connection, stating: “But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses, if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land” (Dubois 5). The real war appears just on the horizon.

Dubois’s piece holds several parallels to the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson. For one it lists grievances and suggests how those actions are unjust according to the country’s own moral standards. Dubois also punts to recycling popular rhetoric by bringing up the rallying cry: “It taxes us without representation” (Dubois, 4). As there was a King in the 1770s, there was a “dominant minority” then in the United States (Dubois 4). Dubois is already tempered in his approach to race relations: It is not all of citizens fault that black people are where they are (as Garvey might have it), it is the fault of a few (relative to the entire population) racists.

In this early work we see several ideas that are apparent in later works by Dubois: France, race relations, and racism and its infection of American systems.

Dubois, W. E. B. “Returning Soldiers.” Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering

Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994. 3-5.

9/3 excerpt from Black Manhattan

I feel this piece of James Weldon Johnson’s history addresses the popular black separatist movement while also restoring class to particular artistic contributions of blacks during the 1920s. As it is edited in our anthology, the piece outlines two major tensions between separate black groups: how do blacks acquire equality and what purpose does art have? What Johnson details and what he neglects indicate some favoritism, a favoritism shaped by his post as executive secretary with the NAACP and his association with the Talented Tenth.

Johnson’s description of landowners has the undertone of defying black separatism espoused by Marcus Garvey and others during the 1920s. The diction employed by Johnson especially emphasizes his insistence, and the Talented Tenth’s, of changing racial perceptions and relations by remaining in the United States. “All classes bought,” Johnson writes, as the classes spent at an unimaginable pace so as to never have to experience that “precarious foothold” they held in the hostile territory of the United States (Johnson, 34). Specifically, the term “hegira” on page 34 illustrates Johnson’s bias, for the term means an exodus of a particular group (in this case white people), and in that aftermath of the exodus a new era begins (OED). Johnson carries an understanding of beginnings that does not rely on having new land to have a new beginning (as Garvey would have it), but rather a new beginning out of an existing land. Later he calls Harlem an expanding “colony,” which reveals the nationalism budding in Harlem, for colonies are typically settlements by like-minded people concentrated on propagating their way of life. So not only is their land already in the United States, but fertile soil for a black identity to grow. In the second half of the reading, Johnson describes some of the art that transmits culture to Harlemites.

The second half’s discussion of various stage performances marks acceptable art. Charles Gilpin emerges as a leading figure recognized by esteemed organizations such as the Drama League. It was Gilpin’s performance in the serious playwright Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones that set off his popularity and critical adoration (Johnson, 38). In addition to Gilpin, several musicals, such as Shuffle Along, Runnin’ Wild, and Dixie to Broadway, elevated black artists to wild popularity. Conspicuously absent from any discussion is vaudeville. Its only mention is in Gilpin’s shameful past, which includes menial jobs such as being an elevator boy, railroad porter, and a boxing trainer (Johnson, 38).

The audiences for very high art performances, particularly interpretations of Shakespeare, are also agonizingly obscured. Johnson’s clunky opener: “On May 7, 1923 there was at the Frazee Theatre what was the most ambitious attempt Negroes had yet made in the legitimate theatre in New York,” hides who actually showed up to the Frazee Theatre and emphasizes the date and theatrical ambition (Johnson 41). Unlike portions discussing the musicals, no mention of traffic stoppages are made, but rather the text moves directly to critical reception. While black artists pushed the Shakespearean envelope, the size of the audience for such a venture is never described.

Through its form Black Manhattan seems to serve as partially a death-knell and resurrecting power. The introduction quotes the famous line: “Harlem is still in the process of making,” though culturally it was being pulled into something not well received by the Talented Tenth (Lewis, xxxvi). Within the timeline of the Harlem Renaissance, Black Manhattan appears alongside other works that did not have the same ambition. Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes all wrote about themes troubling to the Talented Tenth. Johnson had taken a professorship at Fisk University in Tennessee in 1930 and W. E. B. Dubois taught at Atlanta University in Georgia. Harlem was left to be sacked by the mongrels with their base art. With Johnson writing his version of history, he closes off any more contributions that can be made under that particular name, signaling its end—its death. But history also serves to inspire, especially if written properly, so Black Manhattan has the capacity to inspire a new generation to continue racial uplift as seen fit by the Talented Tenth. The introduction’s author points out the romanticized Harlem that cheered when blacks won awards of serious merit and read of “activities above Central Park” (Lewis, xxxvi). In his history of Harlem, Johnson populates the humming “mecca” with landowners and people who appreciate serious stage performances.

"Hegira." The Oxford English Dictionary. Available online at www.oed.com

Johnson, Charles Weldon. from Black Manhattan. Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David

Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1995. 34-45.

Levering Lewis, David. “Introduction.” Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering

Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1995. XII-XLI.