Strong Women in the Poetry of Helene Johnson

ALH Online Review, Series XIX 1

Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Gwendolyn Bennett’s Selected Writings, eds. Belinda Wheeler and Louis J. Parascandola (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 249 pp.

Reviewed by Verner D. Mitchell, University of Memphis

In January 1926 upon the publication of Color, Countee Cullen’s first volume of verse, Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-1981) sent the poet a warm, admiring letter: “I do like your book! I fondle its covers at times being glad that it is you who have done this beautiful thing and wondering a bit wistful-eyed whether or not I shall ever have a book published” (201). With Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, Belinda Wheeler and Louis J. Parascandola provide the first ever collection of Gwendolyn Bennett’s work. It therefore fulfills, after nearly a century, Bennett’s long desire for a book of her own. Bennett is of course no longer with us, but I am certain she would have been thrilled with this landmark volume.

Wheeler and Parascandola’s ambitious, much-needed anthology adds to recent scholarship on Bennett by literary critics including Sandra Govan, Maureen Honey, Cheryl A. Wall, Nina Miller, Mark A. Sanders, and Wheeler herself. Indeed, interest in Bennett has never been keener since her heyday during the 1920s and 30s in Harlem and Paris. At her death in 1981, however, Bennett—like most of the female artists of the Harlem Renaissance—was almost completely forgotten. Even after scholars began recovering the lives and legacies of her contemporaries, including Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson, Nella Larsen, Anita Scott Coleman, Marita Bonner, and Dorothy West, Bennett remained underexamined. Wheeler and Parascandola argue that ironically, she was a victim of her own multiplicity of gifts: “Bennett’s diverse talent in the fields of poetry, short story writing, journalism, art, and editorial work . . . made it difficult for scholars to pigeonhole this dynamic woman into one genre, arguably contributing to her marginalization” (1). The editors aim to bring Bennett’s rich art to new generations of readers, by making available the best of her wide-ranging work.

In her foreword, the distinguished scholar Maureen Honey maintains that Heroine places Bennett’s “multifaceted talent, courage, and vision . . . on full display” (xiv). After the editors’ lucid and well-researched introduction and a timeline that highlights key moments in Bennett’s life, the book is organized into two sections, “Published Work” and “Unpublished Work.” Part one contains 15 of Bennett’s 23 published poems; her two published short stories, “Wedding Day” (1926) and “Tokens” (1927); and representative samples of her published essays, literary columns, book reviews, and visual art. Not every scholar is aware that “oil paintings and graphic art were two mediums Bennett was known for throughout her career” (35). After studying art and drama at Columbia

University and Pratt Institute, she won a faculty position at Howard University in 1924, where she taught graphic design, watercolors, and crafts. While at Howard, she also became an integral member of the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Saturday Nighters” literary club. From 1937 to 1941, she directed first the Harlem Artists Guild and later the Harlem Community Art Center. In fact, where prior studies have focused almost exclusively on Bennett as a Harlem Renaissance writer, the editors’ unique contribution is to shed new light on her personal and professional relationships across artistic disciplines, including literature, visual arts, and theater.

Both Bennett aficionados and those new to her work will find in part two an engaging, intimate portrait. The editors include 20 previously unpublished letters as well as 14 entries from her personal diaries. The letters span the period 1925 (when Bennett was 22 and recently arrived at Howard University) to 1968 (when 66 year-old Bennett and her husband, the Harvard-educated teacher Richard Crosscup, were leaving New York City for Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where they lived, happily, the remainder of their lives). A number of important revelations emerge from the letters. First, they provide illuminating snapshots of her friendships with prominent intellectual and literary figures, including Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, Dorothy West, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Harold Jackman, and Richard Wright. They also reveal, on a sadder note, the debilitating impact years of FBI scrutiny and harassment had on Bennett, along with other black artists. For example, after the FBI had her suspended as director of the Harlem Community Art Center, she asks Locke, in a November 1941 letter: “What am I actually guilty of?” She continues, “After long questioning of all the people who have worked under my supervision where nothing derogatory to my character could be ascertained nor any indication of Communist activities, the investigators turned to witnesses that either had a grudge against me or were people anxious to give ‘information,’ although false” (210-11). Just as FBI surveillance had left Hughes and Wright physically and psychologically traumatized, the Bureau’s harassment also left Bennett so emotionally distraught that she seriously contemplated leaving the country.

The letters and diaries disturbingly portray what Wheeler and Parascandola term “the sometimes-tortured relationship Bennett had with her parents” (194). When Bennett was four years old, her parents divorced, and her father took her from her mother. She would not see or interact with her mother for over 15 years. “I often have wondered in later years,” she discloses in a gripping essay, “whether it was a mother’s intuition that made tears come to her eyes as she kissed me ‘good-bye’ for I never saw her until some sixteen years later” (151). The forced separation, at such a young age, apparently led to a prolonged melancholy that plagued Bennett throughout her life. Indeed, palpable pain and sadness are recurring motifs in her poetry, as in the final stanza of her previously unpublished 1928 verse, “Train Monotony”: “So my days . . . / Barren tracks / Between

the mounds / Of some joy or sadness.” There are, however, at the opposite pole, several uplifting poems of gusto and joy, such as “Fulfillment” and “To Usward.” About Bennett’s verse, Wheeler and Parascandola identify two notable strengths: “her ability to create dynamic anthems of racial uplift and pride for the African American community, and to link youthful imagery with the senses in both traditional and nontraditional forms” (12).

This elegant new volume’s poetry, prose, and astute criticism make it an essential study for students of the Harlem Renaissance, women’s studies, and US intellectual history. A product of investigative thoroughness and persistence, it recovers the details of Bennett’s life, opens new vistas on her writings and visual art, and clearly constitutes a major scholastic accomplishment. On the whole, Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance is a most valuable contribution to scholarship, both historical and literary.