Home in Harlem, New York: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance Writers Author(S): Sidney H
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Home in Harlem, New York: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance Writers Author(s): Sidney H. Bremer Source: PMLA, Vol. 105, No. 1, Special Topic: African and African American Literature (Jan., 1990), pp. 47-56 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462342 Accessed: 27-03-2017 16:13 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA This content downloaded from 76.77.171.74 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:13:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Sidney H. Bremer Home in Harlem, New York: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance Writers SIDNEYH. BREMER earned A*.m erica's mainstream cultur e has long lodged "home" in the her doctorate in English from mythic permanency of a rural cottage. There the kinship circle, sense of belonging, and implicit responsibilities that define Stanford University and "home" are tended by a purely white, motherly wife. As an imaginary teaches literatures and cultures bulwark against industrial urbanization, this mythic image of home of the United States at the in- took shape in the nineteenth century's mass periodicals. It later terdisciplinary University of expanded into the small-town Main Streets of Hollywood movies and Wisconsin, Green Bay, where the privatized suburban fantasies of television. It is an unrealistic, even she is associate professor of Ur- dangerously deceptive image, as many American authors-from Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt to Sinclair Lewis to Joyce Carol Oates- ban and Public Affairs, Liter- have shown. Few of us are wived and familied white men commuting ature, and Women's Studies. to some privileged space apart. Even for those few, the cottage front She has published essays on hides the complexities of familial and social relations. The rural rooted- women as characters and ness of our mythic home ignores, moreover, the predominantly mo- authors in literature, on urban bile, urban realities of modern American life. Indeed, "movement over literature and its biographical a variety of county" may well be Americans"'largest common back- and cultural contexts, and es- ground," as a wise though little remembered Chicago novelist named Edith Wyatt affirmed as early as 1914; and most of us have been doing pecially on the gender differ- our moving and working and living in cities since the 1930 census. ences in turn-of-the-century If we are to feel at home in our changing urban world, we need Chicago literature. "Home in images of home that are more fitting to our experience-not for rea- Harlem, New York" is part of sons of sentiment but in order to feel realistically grounded, belong- her book-length study, tenta- ing, and responsible there. We need specifically urban images of home tively entitled Urban Inter- to be able to see ourselves at home with-even when at odds with- our own experience, with others, and with our dreams in cities. First, sections, on the informing we need to know the city as a physical home place, with the power to influence of gender, ethnicity, evoke sensory memory, what William Faulkner calls the "memory and region on United States [that] knows before knowing remembers" (111). Second, we need to authors' urban experiences and recognize that, like it or not, we belong to urban home communities- imagery. those families and neighborhoods and birthright groups with which we share our history, images, social circumstances, and physical experience. Third, we need to be able to find a symbolic home for our aspirations in the city, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once could in Edmund 47 This content downloaded from 76.77.171.74 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:13:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 48 Home in Harlem, New York Wilson's book-lined New York apartment. ness, Harlem also had its own cultural institutions But that homelike "apartment [where] life was -political organizations, clubs and cafes and mellow and safe" was a city whose loss Fitzgerald theaters, newspapers, and places of worship. Like lamented in his 1932 essay "My Lost City" (25). the Lower East Side, it was touted as a "city within Just when cities were becoming de facto home for a city" (Cahan 51; White 187; see also Ellison 122). most Americans, much American literature Like Jewish immigrants from the pogroms of despaired of an urban "home." It conceded to eth- Eastern Europe, too, Harlem's migrants from the nic minority writers the imaginative home that Jim Crow South viewed the city as a "promised Walt Whitman had offered for mobile urban land"-as Jewish American Mary Antin also Americans when he "loved well those cities" of proclaimed Boston in the title of her 1912 autobi- Manhattan and Brooklyn, with their sensory vi- ography and as Claude Brown, a second- tality, embracing crowds, and visionary unities, in generation Harlem autobiographer, confirmed "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (160-62). The wake of even in 1965 in Manchild in the Promised Land. World War i swamped the Progressive dream of a Brown referred to that vision with some conscious "civic family" that turn-of-the-century Chicago's irony, however. For Harlem's African Americans, residential writers like Henry Blake Fuller, Edith like the Jews before them, were also subject to con- Wyatt, and Elia Peattie had shared with Jane Ad- tinuing minority exclusions-not only from dams (Bremer 39). It also upset the thrust toward American society's daily goods and powers but realistic comprehension and technological prog- also from such common dreams as the sentimen- ress that had mitigated the newcomer's reaction to tal, rural-cottage image of home. So they were the city's strangeness in turn-of-the-century works predisposed to a critical perspective on the domi- by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Up- nant cultural values that World War i had bank- ton Sinclair, Henry James, and others. Only the rupted. Indeed, as in Jewish American literature, latter group's alienating images survived in the a strong tension between hope and oppression Euro-American vision of the living-dead megalop- grounds the Harlem Renaissance vision of urban olis-its physical landscape reduced to a "valley neighborhood-ghetto as a home away from home. of ashes," its society and psyches to grotesque The writers of the Harlem Renaissance were an "fragmentation," and its dreams to "gruesomely extremely mobile crew, who felt joined, not es- preserved" artifacts and mass-produced cliches tranged, by their wanderings, because they were (Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby 23; Dos Passos, qtd. in part of the great migration of black people to the Wagner 63; Wharton 50; West). The megalopoli- urban Northeast around World War i. Collectively tan world epitomized by these images of Greater they developed a vision of an urban home that was New York offers no home to the human body, so- at once an organic place, a birthright community, cial spirit, or soul. and a cultural aspiration. In all three of these But our literature does include an alternative dimensions, the vitality of their home reached out stream of urban imagery. During those same even across continents joined in oppression. And megalopolitan 1920s, some of New York's most Harlem, New York, their capital city within a city, powerful ethnic minority writers bravely claimed was the center. Whether or not they happened to the city-at least, their neighborhood microcosm be living there at any particular time, the Harlem of the city-as a home for the transient outcasts Renaissance writers regarded Harlem as their pri- of American society. Like the Jewish immigrants mary, symbolic home. Thus their Harlem focused crowded into the Lower East Side before them, an exemplary attempt to make a home for mod- Harlem's African American newcomers con- ern urban transients. ' Their lives and works tried stituted a critical mass large enough to sustain a Harlem's strengths as well as its limitations as subculture and to achieve high visibility. Harlem, home place, community, and aspiration. Their too, had its own cultural resources of language, Harlem Renaissance was a civic, as well as an aes- folkways, and ritual aesthetic forms. Although thetic, enterprise. seriously compromised by poverty, undependable Nearly all the Harlem Renaissance writers were white patronage, and a colonized color conscious- urban wanderers. Even those who were raised in This content downloaded from 76.77.171.74 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:13:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Sidney H. Bremer 49 small towns came to Harlem via other cities- Indeed, Harlem's symbolic status knew few cir- Northerner W. E. B. Du Bois from the faculty of cumstantial limits. Wherever they might be, the Atlanta University, Southerner Zora Neale Hur- wandering citizens of Harlem felt its presence ston from service as a manicurist in Washington, whenever they came into contact with its charac- DC, Westerner Wallace Thurman from the post teristic textures, persons, or arts. Distance could office in Los Angeles. Young Langston Hughes ar- even increase African Americans' sense of iden- rived from Cleveland, Nella Larsen from Chicago, tification with Harlem, as a place to go to or as- Rudolph Fisher from Washington, DC, Dorothy pire to or think toward.