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Wallace Thurman's the Blacker the Berry III. MOVING THE DARK GIRL INTO THE CENTER III.1 Beyond the Pale – Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry While color prejudices were a fact of life in the Black community and while those African Americans with dark skin, and in particular women with dark skin, bore the brunt of the intraracial color caste system, authors were reluc- tant to focus on the black Black woman. As playwrights had once believed that the common man was no subject for tragedy because he lacked the re- quired height to fall low enough, there seemed to be an unspoken consensus that the dark girl was not a suitable protagonist for serious literary treatment. As Barbara Christian puts it: The depiction of physical appearance is not a trivial matter, for it has been used as a societal weapon to restrict woman, reducing her to a physical object whose appear- ance is her primary value, as well as being an indicator as to whether she is literally the right or wrong kind of person. For centuries, heroics for a woman consisted largely in her being physically beautiful and overtly compliant. In keeping with that prescription, Afro-American literary female heroes had to be light-skinned, that is, beautiful according to white standards.1 Wallace Thurman broke with this tradition in his first book The Blacker the Berry, which, in the words of Langston Hughes, “was an important novel on a subject little dwelt upon in Negro fiction – the plight of the very dark Negro woman, who encounters in some communities a double wall of color prejudice within and without the race.”2 Until the publication of The Blacker the Berry, Alice Walker remarks with succinct sarcasm, “it was unheard of for a very dark-skinned woman to appear in a novel unless it was clear she was to be recognized as a problem or a joke.”3 Moreover, The Blacker the Berry was the 1 Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism, 190f. 2 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 234f. Hughes himself had treated the difficulties of the dark woman cursorily in his novel Not Without Laughter in which the dark Annjee marries fair Jimboy. Her mother disapproves because “I ain’t never seen a yaller dude yet that meant a dark woman no good [...]” Anjee herself is mad about Jimboy in spite of the fact that he regu- larly leaves her without warning for months at a time because “there were mighty few dark women had a light, strong, good-looking young husband, really a married husband, like Jim- boy, and a little brown kid like Sandy.” Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971, 18, 36. 3 Alice Walker, “Embracing the Dark and the Light,” 114. 158 MOVING THE DARK GIRL INTO THE CENTER first novel in which colorism was not one topic among others, but the main fo- cus. Wallace Thurman, who was very dark of skin, subscribed to the philosophy that realism was the only literary mode that guaranteed a sincere and unpropa- gandistic art – and that personal experience had to be the basis for realistic writing.4 Thurman’s close friend Bruce Nugent contends that “Wally was very conscious of his being Black in a Black society that put Black down and put mulatto coloring up.” This realization was, according to Nugent, “a very im- portant psychological fact in Wally’s life.”5 And it was far more than “a neu- rotic consciousness of his very dark skin”6 – other people frequently treated him disparagingly because of his color. Nugent himself reported that on first meeting Thurman he was shocked by his skin tone: “The idea of this brilliant man being so black! Well, I couldn’t forgive him that. I found some excuse to leave soon, and that was that.”7 It comes as no surprise that Thurman dis- trusted the “light and bright” elite of the race although he was not blind to the fact that fair-skinned people had to struggle with a different set of problems – and he recognized the dramatic potential of color prejudices in all their forms.8 In The Blacker the Berry, published in 1929, Thurman relentlessly attacks the color hierarchy within his race. Earlier he planned to co-author a play with the white William Jourdan Rapp that was titled “Harlem Cinderella” and also dealt with complex color prejudices.9 One of the reasons that prompted Thur- man to choose the intraracial color caste stratification as the topic of his first 4 Cf. Eleonore van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994, 120. Thurman’s protestations in a letter to Fay Jackson from 1928 that “to me race is nothing. It has its importance perhaps to my environment and to my physical and psychologi- cal structure but above all I am an individual of no race, creed, color, or country” seem hardly credible – especially in light of his philosophy concerning personal experience as prerequisite for good artistic writing. Quoted in ibid., 117. 5 Quoted in Eleonore van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance, 69. 6 Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston. A Literary Biography, 43. 7 Tape recording quoted in Eleonore van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance, 173. Van Notten also points out that Nugent mentioned his mother’s objection to his friend- ship with dark Blacks, in particular Dorothy West and Wallace Thurman. Ibid., 172. 8 Cf. Dorothy West, “A Memoir of Wallace Thurman. Elephant's Dance,” Black World (No- vember 1970) 79. Eleonore van Notten argues that Thurman was conscious of the problems of light-skinned Blacks and regretted, for instance, that Walter White in Flight had missed the opportunity to show the complexity of color stratification. Cf. Eleonore van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance, 118. 9 The play was to be about a blue-vein couple that has two daughters, one light, one dark. The fair daughter is favored, the other one turned into a black Cinderella. In the end, however, the light-skinned daughter passes and renounces not only her parents, but also her own brown- skinned child. In contrast, the dark daughter and her black working-class husband whom she has married against her family’s resistance adopt the abandoned child and support the parents who have lost caste in their community. Wallace Thurman, The Collected Writings of Wal- lace Thurman. A Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. by Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 310-312. .
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