The Harlem Renaissance

This is Unit Thirteen of American Literature, part two of two: the rest of Hurston, the women who built the movement, and two procedures. Part one ended with Janie returning alone and beginning to tell her story. That telling is where this part starts, and it is also where the unit's governing idea pays off. The movement argued that the artist need not answer to anyone's expectations, and the hardest test of that claim came from inside. Hurston wrote an essay saying she was not tragically coloured and did not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood, which refused the position of victim in a movement much of which was built on protest, and critics who wanted protest punished her for it. She died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave, and the recovery of her work began when a later novelist went looking for that grave. Around her sit Nella Larsen, who wrote two short novels about passing, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, who printed much of the movement from an editor's chair. Then Hughes, who kept writing for forty years afterwards, and two procedures: one placing a text by the stance it takes toward its reader, and one for recognizing the blues stanza. By the end you will be able to describe Janie's three marriages and the frame. To state what Hurston's essay refuses. To place Larsen and Fauset. To account for the later Hughes. And to place a text by stance and read a blues stanza.

Six entries: a life told in three marriages, an essay that refused a role, an eclipse and a recovery, two more careers, and a long afterward.

Silenced, then heard, then telling.

AML 1220 Janie, Tea Cake, and the Frame

Janie's first two marriages are arrangements, the second to a mayor who forbids her to speak in public, and the third, to a younger man called Tea Cake, is a partnership that ends in a hurricane. She returns alone and begins the telling. The ending returns the reader to the book's first page, which is where the telling started.

Not tragically coloured, she says.

AML 1221 "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"

Hurston's essay says she became coloured at thirteen when she left Eatonville, that she is not tragically coloured, and that she does not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood. It refuses the position of victim in a movement much of which was built on protest. The refusal was a position rather than an evasion, and it cost her.

Forgotten, then found by a novelist.

AML 1222 Hurston's Reception, Eclipse, and Recovery

Hurston was criticized in her lifetime by writers who thought her work insufficiently political, died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave. The witness credits her with inspiring Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, and Walker's search for that grave began the recovery. The recovery is itself part of her story now.

A librarian, a nurse, two novels.

AML 1223 Nella Larsen, *Quicksand* and *Passing*

The witness calls Nella Larsen groundbreaking: trained as a nurse and a librarian, she was the first African American to take a library science degree and the first African American woman awarded a Guggenheim. Her two short novels examine passing, which in them is a plot device and a social fact at the same time.

An editor who printed a generation.

AML 1224 Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Editor's Power

Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote fiction and, as a magazine editor, published many of the movement's writers early in their careers. The witness places her among the Harlem Renaissance figures, and her editorial position shows how much of the movement was made by people choosing what appeared in print. Editorial choice shaped the canon we inherit.

A college assignment, answered honestly.

AML 1225 Hughes's Later Poems

Hughes kept writing for forty years after the movement's decade. "Theme for English B" has a student, the only coloured man in his class, wonder whether what he writes will be true, and conclude that he and his white instructor are part of each other whether either of them likes it. The later work reaches into the fifties.

Three entries to close: a procedure for placing a text, one for hearing a form, and the unit's capstone.

Ask who is expected to be reading.

AML 1226 Placing a Harlem Renaissance Text by Its Stance

Texts from this movement divide by the stance they take toward an audience, and naming the stance answers most questions. The affirming stance addresses Black readers and celebrates without explaining, which is Hughes's position in the manifesto and in the blues poems. The claiming stance takes a European form and occupies it, which is McKay's sonnet and Cullen's, arguing for inclusion by demonstration. The witnessing stance documents violence or injustice for a reader who may not know, which is what "The Lynching" does. The refusing stance declines the role of victim, which is Hurston's essay and part of why she was attacked. Ask whom the text expects to be reading and what it expects them to already believe. The four stances belong to one movement arguing with itself, so a writer can take different ones in different poems. Answer from the passage rather than from the name attached to it.

Line, echo, answer.

AML 1227 Reading the Blues Stanza

Blues-derived poems appear on the exam and are recognized by three features. First, the stanza shape: a line, a repetition of that line with a small variation, and a third line that responds, which is the pattern Hughes takes directly from sung blues. Second, the voice: a first-person speaker in colloquial speech, usually naming an ordinary trouble, money, love, work or weariness, and refusing self-pity. Third, the function of the repetition: in a blues stanza the repeated line is not emphasis but time, the space in which a singer decides what the third line will be. A reader who treats that repetition as mere emphasis will miss why the answering line lands. Not every Hughes poem is a blues poem, since "Harlem" is a series of questions and "I, Too" is a direct address, and neither uses the stanza.

Four stances, one argument.

AML 1228 What Harlem Made and What It Cost

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 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 and if 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 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 and asked 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 a claim on the tradition. Toomer mixed poems, sketches and stories in one book. Hurston went south with a notebook, collected the folklore, wrote a novel in which a silenced woman tells her whole life on a porch, then refused in an essay to be tragically coloured and was punished for it. 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.

That closes Harlem. The next unit is the poetry being written in the same years by a different set of people. You can describe Janie's three marriages, the mayor who forbade her to speak, the partnership that ended in a hurricane, and the frame that returns the last page to the first. You can state what Hurston's essay refuses, the position of victim in a movement built largely on protest, and what the refusal cost her: criticism in her lifetime, poverty at the end, and an unmarked grave that a later novelist went looking for. You can place Nella Larsen, the first African American to take a library science degree, writing two short novels in which passing is plot and social fact at once, and Jessie Fauset, who printed much of the movement from an editor's chair. You can account for the later Hughes, still writing in the fifties. And you can place a text by asking whether it affirms, claims, witnesses or refuses, and recognize a blues stanza by its line, its echo and its answering third line.