Week 8, entry one and two

10/19

“Cordelia the Crude” and “Negro-Art Hokum”

Thurman’s short story “Cordelia the Crude” has slang and dialect interspersed in the narrative, which is helped understood by George Schuyler’s work, “Negro-Art Hokum.” Schuyler concludes whites and blacks are all subject to the same socialization and therefore produce similar art. Schulyer writes: “…[T]heir work shows the impress of nationality rather than race. They all reveal the psychology and culture of their environment—their color is incidental” (98). Thurman’s short story seems to wrestle with this issue because he retells the events of somebody who does not have all that unique of circumstances. Schuyler writes in his work: “Again, the Africamerican is subject to the same economic and social forces that mold the actions and thoughts of the white Americans” (97-98). Cordelia leaves South Carolina for New York because of her family and eventually falls into prostitution because of her defiance to her family and because Harlem is conducive to that lifestyle with its concentration of people in one area.

What is hard to reconcile in light of Schuyler’s work though is the slang and dialect evident in “Cordelia the Crude.” The breaks in the narrative are easily spotted and especially glaring in light of the articulate narration. What these breaks in the narrative seem to suggest is the local flavor of Harlem. While Schuyler is correct that the forces that animate people are indeed national forces, not so much racial ones, the response to those products seems distinctly local. Any woman is capable of becoming “bountiful in the matter of bestowing sexual favors upon persuasive and likely young men,” but perhaps only in Harlem is she “a fus’ class chippie” (Thurman 629, 631). Thurman describes the narrator interacting with Cordelia, flirting with her and everything, but that behavior has the label of a “sheik.” (Thurman 632). The narrator even does not live up to that label when Cordelia says that he “was different from mos’ of des’ sheiks, and when pressed for an explanation [she] brazenly told me in a slightly scandalized and patronizing tone that I had not even felt her legs…!” (Thurman 632). Cordelia has already adopted the language of Harlem to label people and anticipate outcomes based on the labels she attributes to people.

These distinct breaks in narrative do not wholly answer Schuyler’s driving question central to his essay: “How, then, can the black American be expected to produce art and literature dissimilar to that of the white American?” (98). In some ways, the slang and dialect could be boiled down to the different ways people say tomato. There is no suggestion that race is linked to being a “fus’ class chippie” or a “sheik.” When describing Cordelia’s past, he speaks of the Stokeses and their “bad mixed blood in ‘em,” but even the badness of the mixed blood reflects the larger Southern view of interracial people, not just racial views (which Thurman thoroughly explores in The Blacker the Berry).


Entry two

“Hatred,” “Mulatto,” and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

In Hughes’ essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes argues that embracing the beauty of being black enables black artists to create truly liberating art. The selected poems show a preoccupation with whiteness by making their hatred for white people the focus of the poem.

Bennett’s poem “Hatred” seems to have a preoccupation with having the speaker’s hatred validated by instilling fear in white people. The poem ends with the kicker: “Memory will lay its hands / Upon your breast / And you will understand / My hatred.” In some ways the speaker seems incomplete without instilling fear in the white people. I feel like Hughes would argue this poem fails in being meaningful because it is preoccupied with whiteness, still. Despite its venomous tone, its hatred, and even its rash pronunciation of black empowerment (the “rekindled fires” in the speakers’ eyes), it is still this internalization of whiteness. “Hatred” can be read as an attempt to traverse the racial mountain before black artists. The tools are there with the darts of singing steel but the speaker is immersed in that culture where whiteness is regarded as superior, not the culture Hughes sees holding the great Negro artist: “These common people…will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself” (Hughes 92). That culture of the common folk, as Hughes describes it, is firmly planted in the present, jovial, and vibrant. They hardly seem like the type to play hatred as “a game / Play with cool hands / And slim fingers” (Bennett 223).

Hughes poem “Mulatto” is interesting because it tells of a speaker killing his father to gain racial freedom. Yet Hughes does not choose the jazz form he is so known for, but really an arguably “white” form, the sonnet. Like the speaker in “Hatred,” the speaker in “Mulatto” is preoccupied with validating his or herself by having the whites feel the hatred the speaker experiences. What is unsaid in Benett’s poem is explicitly laid out in Hughes’, however; the aim of the hatred is to create a future for the speaker by liberating himself from the whiteness of heritage. The whiteness has given the speaker a “bastard birth-mark,” a constant reminder of the whiteness within. It would appear from that liberation the speaker can identify only his or her black race, and perhaps embrace that.