What Harlem Made and What It Cost

The idea

The Harlem Renaissance is the first American literary movement in which Black writers set the terms of the argument, and the argument was about what Black art owed anyone. The migration north supplied the people, one New York neighbourhood supplied the concentration, and Alain Locke's anthology supplied the name and the programme: a figure who was urban, modern and done apologizing. What followed divided over method rather than over purpose. Hughes wrote the movement's manifesto, declaring that the younger artists intended to express their individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame, that if white people were pleased they were glad, that if they were not it did not matter, and that they knew they were beautiful. He then did what the manifesto claimed, bringing the blues stanza, the spiritual, colloquial speech and the sound of a Harlem piano into poems, and asking in eleven lines what happens to a dream deferred. Cullen took the opposite road on purpose, writing in the English tradition and asking in a sonnet's closing couplet why God would make a poet Black and bid him sing. McKay put an atrocity inside fourteen rhymed lines and made the form itself a claim on the tradition. Toomer mixed poems, sketches and stories in a single book and imagined an identity past race altogether. Hurston went south with a notebook, collected the folklore, and wrote a novel in which a woman silenced by two husbands tells her whole life on a porch, then refused in an essay to be tragically coloured and was punished for it by critics who wanted protest. Larsen wrote two short novels about passing, and Fauset printed much of the movement from an editor's chair. The cost is in the record too: patrons with expectations, magazines with limits, and a writer of Hurston's gift dying in poverty before a later novelist went looking for her grave.