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Here's a selection of reviews of writers of the
Harlem Renaissance.
Home
to Harlem by Claude McKay || Cane
by Jean Toomer || Jonah's
Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston ||
The Ways of White
Folks by Langston Hughes || Black
Boy by Richard Wright || The
Wedding by Dorothy West
Home to
Harlem by Claude McKay
Northeastern University Press, 1928
Novel, 340 pages
Claude McKay, a writer often associated with
the Harlem Renaissance, tells us Jake's story in
Home to Harlem. A veteran of World War I, Jake
returns to an America that provides few
opportunities for a black man. We learn about
his friendships, his loves, his jobs and life in
Harlem in the twenties. A ground breaking and
important book, Home to Harlem shows a life and
culture in all its raw and seamy exuberance and
in the dialect of the people living it. Jake
meets and sleeps with a succession of
"chippies," but never forgets the "lost brown"
whom he has fallen in love with. All the dangers
and beauty of the times are brought to the
reader in a memorable chronicle of an era.
R.T.
Excerpt
Jake, since he had given up hoping about his
lost brown, had stopped haunting the Baltimore,
yet he had happened to be very much in on the
affair that cost the Baltimore its license.
Jake's living with Rose had, in spite of
himself, projected him into a more elegant
atmosphere or worldliness. Through Rose and her
associates he had gained access to buffet flats
and private rendezvous apartments that were
called "nifty."
And Jake was a high favorite wherever he
went. There was something so naturally beautiful
about his presence that everybody liked and
desired him. Buddies, on the slightest
provocation, were ready to fight for him, and
girls liked to make an argument around him.
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Cane by Jean
Toomer
Originally published 1923
Sketches, poems, and stories, 116 pages
Cane is one of the works of fiction that
announced the arrival of the Harlem Renaissance.
Though a slim volume, this collection of
sketches, stories and poems makes up a dense and
powerful book. Through vivid imagery and
authentic dialects, Jean Toomer realistically
portrays the lives and experiences of
African-Americans, from the Southern peasant to
the urban black in the North. Neither glorified
nor stereotyped, Toomer's characters speak in
their own voices and are completely themselves,
their behavior reflecting the truth about who
and what they are. Cane compels the reader to
feel its power on a physical level. At the time
the book was published, and still today, these
full, rich characters and images lead us to a
greater understanding of the human condition.
N.P.
Excerpt
Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the
rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn
beams of oak of the prewar cotton factory, dusk
came. Up from the dusk the full moon came.
Glowing like a fired pine-knot, it illumined the
great door and soft showered the Negro shanties
aligned along the single street of factory town.
The full moon in the great door was an omen.
Negro women improvised songs against its
spell.
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Jonah's Gourd
Vine by Zora Neale Hurston
Originally published 1934
Novel, 206 pages
Zora Neale Hurston's works, though critically
acclaimed in the 30's, did not find wide
readership until the late 70's when Alice Walker
rediscovered and drew attention to the Harlem
Renaissance author. Since then, many prominent
writers of the black experience have turned to
her for inspiration. Jonah's Gourd Vine,
Hurston's first novel, is the story of John
Pearson, an uneducated black farm laborer who
sets out to make a better life for himself. His
God-given gifts, his "gourd vine," are his good
looks and a way with words. These gifts,
however, become his downfall, the Biblical worm
that withers the vine. Lucy, his long-suffering
wife, sees his gifts and his flaws, but cannot
save him from himself. J.G.
Excerpt
"Ah ain't goin' tuh hush nothin' uh de kind.
Youse livin' dirty and Ahm goin' tuh tell you
'bout it. Me and mah chillun got some rights.
Big talk ain't changin' whut you doin'. You
can't clean yo'self wid yo' tongue lak uh
cat."
There was a resounding smack. Lucy covered
her face with her hand, and John drew back in a
sort of horror, and instantly strove to remove
the brand from his soul by words, "Ah tole yuh
tuh hush." He found himself shaking as he backed
towards the door.
"De hidden wedge will come tuh light some
day, John. Mark mah words. Youse in de majority
now, but God sho don't love ugly."
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The Ways of
White Folks by Langston Hughes
Originally published 1934
Short stories, 255 pages
In this book of short stories, Langston
Hughes showed himself to be a mesmerizing
storyteller--with chilling, witty,
grab-you-by-the-throat tales of African
Americans living in a white man's world. From
the Colonel whose "black bastard" son will not
learn his place, to the artist couple who "went
in for Negroes," Hughes knows the "ways of White
folks." The people and places of the 1930's are
real and detailed, but it is the universality of
the hope, fears, and sufferings of his
characters that make these vignettes timeless.
J.M.
Excerpt
The little Negro whose name was Roy Williams
began to choke on the blood in his mouth. And
the roar of their voices and the scuff of their
feet were split by the moonlight into a thousand
notes like a Beethoven sonata. And when the
white folks left his brown body, stark naked,
strung from a tree at the edge of town, it hung
there all night, like a violin for the wind to
play.
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Black Boy by
Richard Wright
Originally published 1937
Autobiography, 285 pages
Black Boy is an autobiographical account of
Richard Wright's childhood and early adulthood
in the South of the 1910s and 20s. First
abandoned by his father, then virtually orphaned
when illness made an invalid of his mother,
Richard was repeatedly uprooted and always
accompanied by poverty, hunger, and cruelty. We
see signs of the writer he would become as he
discovers and puzzles over questions of racial
identity; as he learns to fear and then hate
white people; as he articulates his experience
of religion as tyrannical and manipulative.
Against all odds, Wright recognized and
maintained his sense of personal integrity and
entitlement at the core of his being, refusing
to accept a status that would prevent him from
tasting the full range of human experience.
C.W.
Excerpt
I was in my fifteenth year; in terms of
schooling I was far behind the average youth of
the nation, but I did not know that. In me was
shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness,
a mode of being that the way of life about me
had said could not be, must not be, and upon
which the penalty of death had been placed.
Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my
life had switched onto the wrong track and,
without my knowing it, the locomotive of my
heart was rushing down a dangerously steep
slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the
warning red lights that blinked all about me,
the sirens and the bells and the screams that
filled the air.
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The Wedding
by Dorothy West
Doubleday, 1995
Novel, 240 pages
The Wedding is the long awaited novel by
Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the
Harlem Renaissance. It takes us to the Oval on
Martha's Vineyard, where we discover the
summer-home world of the wealthy black
community. As Shelby Coles' wedding approaches,
we are invited to see the mores and history of
this elite group, and to discover how their
ancestors' struggles brought them to this
privileged spot. On one hand, this community of
old money and high society descended from slaves
is a distinctive one. On the other hand, the
families of the Oval mirror both the flaws and
the attributes of any privileged group.
In her wholly original style, West uses
language in creative and surprising ways. The
reader may find herself rereading passages just
for the description and insight. When you pick
up this book, prepare for an enriching and
enjoyable experience. R.T.
Excerpt
But how Shelby, who could have had her pick
of the best of breed in her own race, could
marry outside her race, outside her father's
profession, and throw her life away on a
nameless, faceless white man who wrote jazz, a
frivolous occupation without office, title, or
foreseeable future, was beyond the Oval's
understanding.
Between the dark man Liz had married and the
music maker Shelby was marrying, there was a
whole area of eligible men of the right colors
and right professions. For Liz and Shelby to
marry so contrary to expectations affronted all
the subtle tenets of their training.
Though Shelby might have been headstrong in
her choice of a husband, at least she had let
her mother dissuade her from following Liz's
lead and eloping. Her wedding would have the
Oval setting that Corinne had promised Miss
Adelaide Bannister on a golden afternoon in her
daughter's teens.
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