“The Making of Harlem,” an essay by James Weldon Johnson, 1925

James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871 in Florida.  After attending Atlanta University, he returned to Florida to become the principal of a high school in Jacksonville. In 1901, he moved to New York City to join and collaborate with his brother. Together they wrote” Lift Ev’ry Voice,” a song that has become known as the “Negro National Anthem.” The titles for these Sourcebooks come from this song.  By 1920, Johnson was a national organizer for the NAACP and at the same time, he continued to write and edit. In 1922, he edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, and in 1927, one of his most famous pieces was published-- a collection of poetry entitled “God’s Trombones.”  This essay,” The Making of Harlem,” was published in The Survey Graphic, which had devoted an issue to writings from and about Harlem. Johnson died in 1938.

In the history of New York, the significance of the name Harlem has changed from Dutch to Irish to Jewish to Negro. Of these changes, the last has come most swiftly. Throughout colored America, from Massachusetts to Mississippi, and across the continent to Los Angeles and Seattle, its name, which as late as fifteen years ago had scarcely been heard, now stands for the Negro metropolis. Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the whole Negro world; for the lure of it has reached down to every island of the Carib Sea and has penetrated even into Africa.

In the make-up of New York, Harlem is not merely a Negro colony or community, it is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world. It is not a slum or a fringe, it is located in the heart of Manhattan and occupies one of the most beautiful and healthful sections of the city. It is not a "quarter" of dilapidated tenements, but is made up of New-law apartments and handsome dwellings, with well-paved and well-lighted streets. It has its own churches, social and civic centers, shops, theatres and other places of amusement. And it contains more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth. A stranger who rides up magnificent Seventh Avenue on a bus or in an automobile must be struck with surprise at the transformation which takes place after he crosses One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. Beginning there, the population suddenly darkens and he rides through twenty-five solid blocks where the passers-by, the shoppers, those sitting in restaurants, coming out of theatres, standing in doorways and looking out of windows are practically all Negroes; and then he emerges where the population as suddenly becomes white again. There is nothing just like it in any other city in the country, for there is no preparation for it; no change in the character of the houses and streets; no change, indeed, in the appearance of the people, except their color…

The West Fifty-third Street settlement deserves some special mention because it ushered in a New phase of life among colored New Yorkers. Three rather well appointed hotels were opened in the street and they quickly became the centers of a sort of fashionable life that hitherto had not existed. On Sunday evenings these hotels served dinner to music and attracted crowds of well-dressed diners. One of these hotels, The Marshall, became famous as the headquarters of Negro talent. There gathered the actors, the musicians, the composers, the writers, the singers, dancers and vaudevillians. There one went to get a close-up of Williams and Walker, Cole and Johnson, Ernest Hogan, Will Marion Cook, Jim Europe, Aida Overton, and of others equally and less known. Paul Laurence Dunbar was frequently there whenever he was in New York. Numbers of those who love to shine by the light reflected from celebrities were always to be found. The first modern jazz band ever heard in New York, or, perhaps anywhere, was organized at The Marshall. It was a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making the first dominant use of banjos, saxophones, clarinets and trap drums in combination, and was called The Memphis Students. Jim Europe was a member of that band, and out of it grew the famous Clef Club, of which he was the noted leader, and which for a long time monopolized the business of "entertaining" private parties and furnishing music for the New dance craze. Also in the Clef Club was "Buddy" Gilmore who originated trap drumming as it is now practiced, and set hundreds of white men to juggling their sticks and doing acrobatic stunts while they manipulated a dozen other noise-making devices aside from their drums. A good many well-known white performers frequented The Marshall and for seven or eight years the place was one of the sights of New York…

Following the outbreak of the war in Europe, Negro Harlem received a new and tremendous impetus. Because of the war, thousands of aliens in the United States rushed back to their native lands to join the colors, and immigration practically ceased The result was a critical shortage in labor. This shortage was rapidly increased as the United States went more and more largely into the business of furnishing munitions and supplies to the warring countries. To help meet this shortage of common labor, Negroes were brought up from the South .The government itself took the first steps, following the practice in vogue in Germany of shifting labor according to the supply and demand in various parts of the country The example of the government was promptly taken up by the big industrial concerns, which sent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of labor agents into the South who recruited Negroes by wholesale. I was in Jacksonville, Fla., for a while at that time, and I sat one day and watched the stream of migrants passing to take the train. For hours they passed steadily, carrying flimsy suit cases, new and shiny, rusty old ones, bursting at the seams, boxes and bundles and impedimenta of all sorts, including banjos, guitars, birds in cages and what not. Similar scenes were being enacted in cities and towns all over that region. The first wave of the great exodus of Negroes from the South was on. Great numbers of these migrants headed for New York or eventually got there, and naturally the majority went up into Harlem. But the Negro population of Harlem was not swollen by migrants from the South alone; the opportunity for Negro labor exerted its pull upon the Negroes of the West Indies, and those islanders in the course of time poured into Harlem to the number of twenty-five thousand or more.

These new-comers did not have to look for work; work looked for them, and at wages of which they had never even dreamed. And here is where the unlooked for, the unprecedented, the miraculous happened. According to all preconceived notions, these Negroes suddenly earning large sums of money for the first time in their lives should have had their heads turned; they should have squandered it in the most silly and absurd manners imaginable. Later, after the United States had entered the war and even Negroes in the South were making money fast, many stories in accord with the tradition came out of that section. There was the one about the colored man who went into a general store and on hearing a phonograph for the first time promptly ordered six of them, one for each child in the house. I shall not stop to discuss whether Negroes in the South did that sort of thing or not, but I do know that those who got to New York didn't. The Negroes of Harlem, for the greater part, worked and saved their money. Nobody knew how much they had saved until congestion made expansion necessary for tenants and ownership profitable for landlords, and they began to buy property. Persons who would never be suspected of having money bought property. The Rev. W. W. Brown, pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Church, repeatedly made "Buy property" the text of his sermons. A large part of his congregation carried out the injunction. The church itself set an example by purchasing a magnificent brown stone church building on Seventh Avenue from a white congregation. Buying property became a fever. At the height of this activity, that is, 1920-21, it was not an uncommon thing for a colored washerwoman or cook to go into a real estate office and lay down from one thousand to five thousand dollars on a house…  Today Negro Harlem is practically owned by Negroes.

The question naturally arises, "Are the Negroes going to be able to hold Harlem?" If they have been steadily driven northward for the past hundred years and out of less desirable sections, can they hold this choice bit of Manhattan Island? It is hardly probable that Negroes will hold Harlem indefinitely, but when they are forced out it will not be for the same reasons that forced them out of former quarters in New York City. The situation is entirely different and without precedent. When colored people do leave Harlem, their homes, their churches, their investments and their businesses, it will be because the land has become so valuable they can no longer afford to live on it. But the date of another move northward is very far in the future. What will Harlem be and become in the meantime? Is there danger that the Negro may lose his economic status in New York and be unable to hold his property? Will Harlem become merely a famous ghetto, or will it be a center of intellectual, cultural and economic forces exerting an influence throughout the world, especially upon Negro peoples? Will it become a point of friction between the races in New York?

I think there is less danger to the Negroes of New York of losing out economically and industrially than to the Negroes of any large city in the North. In most of the big industrial centers Negroes are engaged in gang labor. They are employed by thousands in the stock yards in Chicago, by thousands in the automobile plants in Detroit; and in those cities they are likely to be the first to be let go, and in thousands, with every business depression. In New York there is hardly such a thing as gang labor among Negroes, except among the longshoremen, and it is in the longshoremen's unions, above all others, that Negroes stand on an equal footing. Employment among Negroes in New York is highly diversified; in the main they are employed more as individuals than as non-integral parts of a gang. Furthermore, Harlem is gradually becoming more and more a self-supporting community. Negroes there are steadily branching out into new businesses and enterprises in which Negroes are employed. So the danger of great numbers of Negroes being thrown out of work at once, with a resulting economic crisis among them, is less in New York than in most of the large cities of the North to which Southern migrants have come.

These facts have an effect which goes beyond the economic and industrial situation. They have a direct bearing on the future character of Harlem and on the question as to whether Harlem will be a point of friction between the races in New York. It is true that Harlem is a Negro community, well defined and stable; anchored to its fixed homes, churches, institutions, business and amusement places; having its own working, business and professional classes. It is experiencing a constant growth of group consciousness and community feeling. Harlem is therefore, in many respects, typically Negro. It has many unique characteristics. It has movement, color, gaiety, singing, dancing, boisterous laughter and loud talk. One of its outstanding features is brass band parades. Hardly a Sunday passes but that there are several of these parades of which many are gorgeous with regalia and insignia. Almost any excuse will do--the death of an humble member of the Elks, the laying of a corner stone, the "turning out" of the order of this or that. In many of these characteristics it is similar to the Italian colony. But withal, Harlem grows more metropolitan and more a part of New York all the while. Why is it then that its tendency is not to become a mere "quarter" ?

I shall give three reasons that seem to me to be important in their order. First, the language of Harlem is not alien; it is not Italian or Yiddish; it is English. Harlem talks American, reads American, thinks American. Second, Harlem is not physically a "quarter." It is not a section cut off. It is merely a zone through which four main arteries of the city run. Third, the fact that there is little or no gang labor gives Harlem Negroes the opportunity for individual expansion and individual contacts with the life and spirit of New York. A thousand Negroes from Mississippi put to work as a gang in a Pittsburgh steel mill will for a long time remain a thousand Negroes from Mississippi. Under the conditions that prevail in New York they would all within six months become New Yorkers. The rapidity with which Negroes become good New Yorkers is one of the marvels to observers.

These three reasons form a single reason why there is small probability that Harlem will ever be a point of race friction between the races in New York. One of the principal factors in the race riot in Chicago in 19l9 was the fact that at that time there were 12,000 Negroes employed in gangs in the stock yards. There was considerable race feeling in Harlem at the time of the hegira of' white residents due to the "invasion," but that feeling, of course, is no more. Indeed, a number of the old white residents who didn't go or could not get away before the housing shortage struck New York are now living peacefully side by side with colored residents. In fact, in some cases white and colored tenants occupy apartments in the same house. Many white merchants still do business in thickest Harlem. On the whole, I know of no place in the country where the feeling between the races is so cordial and at the same time so matter-of-fact and taken for granted. One of the surest safeguards against an outbreak in New York such as took place in so many Northern cities in the summer of 1919 is the large proportion of Negro police on duty in Harlem.

To my mind, Harlem is more than a Negro community; it is a large scale laboratory experiment in the race problem. The statement has often been made that if Negroes were transported to the North in large numbers the race problem with all of its acuteness and with new aspects would be transferred with them. Well, 175,000 Negroes live closely together in Harlem, in the heart of New York, 75,000 more than live in any Southern city, and do so without any race friction. Nor is there any unusual record of crime. I once heard a captain of the 38th Police Precinct (the Harlem precinct) say that on the whole it was the most law-abiding precinct in the city. New York guarantees its Negro citizens the fundamental rights of American citizenship and protects them in the exercise of those rights. In return the Negro loves New York and is proud of it, and contributes in his way to its greatness. He still meets with discriminations, but possessing the basic rights, he knows that these discriminations will be abolished.

I believe that the Negro's advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in any other place in the country, and that Harlem will become the intellectual, the cultural and the financial center for Negroes of the United States, and will exert a vital influence upon all Negro peoples.

Document 5.7.1

The complete essay may be found at: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/harlem/JohMakiF.html

Alain Locke (1886–1954) was the only son of a couple who belonged solidly to the black elite of Philadelphia. He excelled at Central High School and later (1902-04), at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy where his father taught. He then entered Harvard and graduated magna cum laude in 1907. In that year, he became the first black American to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship. He earned a degree at Oxford, studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, and then returned to the U.S. in 1912 to teach at Howard University. After completing a doctorate from Harvard, he became chair of the philosophy department at Howard where he remained for the rest of his life. 

“Perhaps more important than his own literary accomplishments was his influence on the younger Harlem intellectuals.  With remarkable skill and devotion, he directed their energies, helped them to be published, and put several of them into contact with patrons…An indefatigable proponent of the role of art as a bridge between individuals and cultures, Locke was one of the most influential of the contemporary champions of the Harlem Renaissance.” (from the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, general editors, Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, p. 961)

The New Negro

The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence. So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being--a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be "kept down," or "in his place," or 'helped up," to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality. Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has had to subscribe to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation. But while the minds of most of us, black and white, have thus burrowed in the trenches of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the actual march of development has simply flanked these positions, necessitating a sudden reorientation of view. We have not been watching in the right direction; set North and South on a sectional axis, we have not noticed the East till the sun has us blinking.

Recall how suddenly the Negro spirituals revealed themselves; suppressed for generations under the stereotypes of Wesleyan hymn harmony, secretive, half-ashamed, until the courage of being natural brought them out--and behold, there was folk-music. Similarly the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation. Until recently, lacking self-understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to others. But the decade that found us with a problem has left us with only a task. The multitude perhaps feels as yet only a strange relief and a new vague urge, but the thinking few know that in the reaction the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken.

With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership. As one of them has discerningly put it:

We have tomorrow

Bright before us

Like a flame.

Yesterday, a night-gone thing

A sun-down name.

And Dawn today

Broad arch above the road we came.

We march!

(From Langston Hughes, Youth)

This is what, even more than any "most creditable record of fifty years of freedom," requires that the Negro of to-day be seen through other than the dusty spectacles of past controversy. The day of "aunties," "uncles" and "mammies" is equally gone… 

The tide of Negro migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest. Neither labor demand, the boll weevil nor the Ku Klux Klan is a basic factor, however contributory any or all of them may have been. The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance--in the Negro's case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.

Take Harlem as an instance of this. Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another. Proscription and prejudice have thrown these dissimilar elements into a common area of contact and interaction.

Within this area, race sympathy and unity have determined a further fusing of sentiment and experience. So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race-welding. Hitherto, it must be admitted that American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common. In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is--or promises at least to be--a race capital….

When the racial leaders of twenty years ago spoke of developing race-pride and stimulating race-consciousness, and of the desirability of race solidarity, they could not in any accurate degree have anticipated the abrupt feeling that has surged up and now pervades the awakened centers. Some of the recognized Negro leaders and a powerful section of white opinion count this feeling as a “passing phase," an attack of "race nerves" so to speak, an "aftermath of the war," and the like. It has not abated, however, if we are to gauge by the present tone and temper of the Negro press, or by the shift in popular support from the officially recognized and orthodox spokesmen to those of the independent, popular, and often radical type who are unmistakable symptoms of a new order. It is a social disservice to blunt the fact that the Negro of the Northern centers has reached a stage where tutelage, even of the most interested and well-intentioned sort, must give place to new relationships, where positive self-direction must be reckoned with in ever increasing measure. The American mind must reckon with a fundamentally changed Negro…

Up to the present, one may adequately describe the Negro's "inner objectives" as an attempt to repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective. Their realization has required a new mentality for the American Negro. And as it matures we begin to see its effects; at first, negative, iconoclastic, and then positive and constructive. In this new group psychology we note the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and "touchy" nerves, the repudiation of the double standard of judgment with its special philanthropic allowances and then the sturdier desire for objective and scientific appraisal; and finally the rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense of social debt to the responsibilities of social contribution, and offsetting the necessary working and commonsense acceptance of restricted conditions, the belief in ultimate esteem and recognition. Therefore the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not. He resents being spoken of as a social ward or minor, even by his own, and to being regarded a chronic patient for the sociological clinic, the sick man of American Democracy. 

For the same reasons, he himself is through with those social nostrums and panaceas, the so-called "solutions" of his "problem," with which he and the country have been so liberally dosed in the past. Religion, freedom, education, money--in turn, he has ardently hoped for and peculiarly trusted these things; he still believes in them, but not in blind trust that they alone will solve his life-problem. 

Each generation, however, will have its creed, and that of the present is the belief in the efficacy of collective effort, in race co-operation. This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring of Negro life. It seems to be the outcome of the reaction to proscription and prejudice; an attempt, fairly successful on the whole, to convert a defensive into an offensive position, a handicap into an incentive. It is radical in tone, but not in purpose and only the most stupid forms of opposition, misunderstanding or persecution could make it otherwise. Of course, the thinking Negro has shifted a little toward the left with the world-trend, and there is an increasing group who affiliate with radical and liberal movements. But fundamentally for the present the Negro is radical on race matters, conservative on others, in other words, a "forced radical," a social protestant rather than a genuine radical… 

There is, of course, a warrantably comfortable feeling in being on the right side of the country's professed ideals. We realize that we cannot be undone without America's undoing. It is within the gamut of this attitude that the thinking Negro faces America, but with variations of mood that are if anything more significant than the attitude itself. Sometimes we have it taken with the defiant ironic challenge of [Harlem Renaissance poet Claude] McKay: 

Mine is the future grinding down to-day

Like a great landslip moving to the sea.

Bearing its freight of debris far away

Where the green hungry waters restlessly

Heave mammoth pyramids, and break and roar

Their eerie challenge to the crumbling shore.

Sometimes, perhaps more frequently as yet, it is taken in the fervent and almost filial appeal and counsel of Weldon Johnson's:

O Southland, dear Southland!

Then why do you still cling

To an idle age and a musty page.

To a dead and useless thing?

{ from Southland, 1907}

But between defiance and appeal, midway almost between cynicism and hope, the prevailing mind stands in the mood of the same author's To America (1917), an attitude of sober query and stoical challenge:

How would you have us, as we are?

    Or sinking 'neath the load we bear,

Our eyes fixed forward on a star.

    Or gazing empty at despair?

Rising or falling? Men or things?

    With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?

Strong, willing sinews in your wings,

    Or tightening chains about your feet?

More and more, however, an intelligent realization of the great discrepancy between the American social creed and the American social practice forces upon the Negro the taking of the moral advantage that is his. Only the steadying and sobering effect of a truly characteristic gentleness of spirit prevents the rapid rise of a definite cynicism and counter-hate and a defiant superiority feeling…

Fortunately there are constructive channels opening out into which the balked social feelings of the American Negro can flow freely.

Without them there would be much more pressure and danger than there is. These compensating interests are racial but in a new and enlarged way. One is the consciousness of acting as the advance-guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization; the other, the sense of a mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible. Harlem, as we shall see, is the center of both these movements; she is the home of the Negro's "Zionism." The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem. A Negro newspaper carrying news material in English, French and Spanish, gathered from all quarters of America, the West Indies and Africa has maintained itself in Harlem for over five years. Two important magazines, both edited from New York, maintain their news and circulation consistently on a cosmopolitan scale. Under American auspices and backing, three pan-African congresses have been held abroad for the discussion of common interests, colonial questions and the future cooperative development of Africa. In terms of the race question as a world problem, the Negro mind has leapt, so to speak, upon the parapets of prejudice and extended its cramped horizons. In so doing it has linked up with the growing group consciousness of the dark-peoples and is gradually learning their common interests. As one of our writers has recently put it: "It is imperative that we understand the white world in its relations to the non-white world." As with the Jew, persecution is making the Negro international…

With the American Negro, his new internationalism is primarily an effort to recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation. Garveyism [Marcus Garvey, see Lesson 6] may be a transient, if spectacular, phenomenon, but the possible role of the American Negro in the future development of Africa is one of the most constructive and universally helpful missions that any modern people can lay claim to.

Constructive participation in such causes cannot help giving the Negro valuable group incentives, as well as increased prestigé at home and abroad. Our greatest rehabilitation may possibly come through such channels, but for the present, more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective. It must be increasingly recognized that the Negro has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art, music especially, which has always found appreciation, but in larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways. For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament. In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven of

humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble unacknowledged source. A second crop of the Negro's gifts promises still more largely. He now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization. The great social gain in this is the releasing of our talented group … to the productive fields of creative expression. The … cultural recognition they win should in turn prove the key to that revaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further betterment of race relationships. But whatever the general effect, the present generation will have added the motives of self-expression and spiritual development to the old and still unfinished task of making material headway and progress. No one who …views the new scene with its … abundant promise can be entirely without hope. And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least… celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.

Source: Lewis, David Levering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  ETC

http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/wsharpe/citylit/NewNegro.htm

Wilfrid Adolphus Domingo was born in Jamaica in 1889 and migrated to the United States at the age of twenty-one.  He worked as a journalist, and was a founder of the African Blood Brotherhood, an organization whose mission combined militant black nationalism with socialism. He edited “The Negro World” and “Messenger” magazine, a publication launched by African American socialists, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. Though at first a supporter of Marcus Garvey, Domingo moved away from Garveyism because he felt that Garvey’s racial chauvinism would slow the progress of genuine socialism among African Americans. 

Almost unobserved, America plays her usual role in the meeting, mixing and welding of the colored peoples of the earth.  A dusky tribe of destiny seekers, these brown and black and yellow folk, eyes filled with visions of an alien heritage--palm-fringed seashores, murmuring streams, luxuriant hills and vales--have made an epical march from the far corners of the earth to the Port of New York and America.  They bring the gift of the black tropics to America and to their kinsmen.  With them come vestiges of a quaint folk life, other social traditions, and as for the first time in their lives, colored people of Spanish, French, Dutch, Arabian, Danish, Portuguese, British and native African ancestry meet and move together, there comes into Negro life the stir and leavening that is uniquely American.  Despite his inconsiderable numbers, the black foreigner is a considerable factor and figure.  It is not merely his picturesqueness that he brings, his lean, sun-burnt features, quaint manners and speech, his tropical incongruities, these as with all folkways rub off in less than a generation--it is his spirit that counts and has counted in the interplay of his life with the native population.  

According to the census for 1920 there were in the United States 73,803 foreign-born Negroes; of that number 36,613, or approximately 50 per cent, lived in New York City, 28,184 of them in the Borough of Manhattan.  They formed slightly less than 20 per cent of the total Negro population of New York.  

Here they have their first contact with each other, with large numbers of American Negroes, and with the American brand of race prejudice.  Divided by tradition, culture, historical background and group perspective, these diverse peoples are gradually hammered into a loose unit by the impersonal force of congested residential segregation.  Unlike others of the foreign-born, black immigrants find it impossible to segregate themselves into colonies; too dark of complexion to pose as Cubans or some other Negroid but alien-tongued foreigners, they are inevitably swallowed up in black Harlem.  Their situation requires an adjustment unlike that of any other class of the immigrant population; and but for the assistance of their kinsfolk they would be capsized almost on the very shores of their haven.  

From 1920 to 1923 the foreign-born Negro population of the United States was increased nearly 40 per cent through the entry of 30,849 Africans (black).  In 1921 the high-water mark of 9,873 was registered.  This increase was not permanent, for in 1923 there was an exit of 1,525 against an entry of 7,554.  If the 20 per cent that left that year is an index of the proportion leaving annually, it is safe to estimate a net increase of about 24,000 between 1920 and 1923.  If the newcomers are distributed throughout the country in the same proportion as their predecessors, the present foreign-born Negro population of Harlem is about 35,000.  These people are, therefore, a formidable minority whose presence cannot be ignored or discounted.  It is this large body of foreign-born who contribute those qualities that make New York so unlike Pittsburgh, Washington, Chicago and other cities with large aggregations of American Negroes.  

The largest number come from the British West Indies and are attracted to America mainly by economic reasons: though considerable numbers of the younger generation come for the purposes of education.  The next largest group consists of Spanish-speaking Negroes from Latin America.  Distinct because of their language, and sufficiently numerous to maintain themselves as a cultural unit, the Spanish element has but little contact with the English-speaking majority.  For the most part they keep to themselves and follow in the main certain definite occupational lines.  A smaller group, French-speaking, have emigrated from Haiti and the French West Indies.  There are also a few Africans, a batch of voluntary pilgrims over the old track of the slave-traders.  

Among the English-speaking West Indian population of Harlem are some 8,000 natives of the American Virgin Islands.  A considerable part of these people were forced to migrate to the mainland as a consequence of the operation of the Volstead [Prohibition] Act which destroyed the lucrative rum industry and helped to reduce the number of foreign vessels that used to call at the former free port of Charlotte Amelia for various stores.  Despite their long Danish connection these people are culturally and linguistically English, rather than Danish.  Unlike the British Negroes in New York, the Virgin Islanders take an intelligent and aggressive interest in the affairs of their former home, and are organized to co-operate with their brothers there who are valiantly struggling to substitute civil government for the present naval administration of the islands.  

To the average American Negro, all English-speaking black foreigners are West Indians, and by that is usually meant British subjects.  There is a general assumption that there is everything in common among West Indians, though nothing can be further from the truth.  West Indians regard themselves as Antiguans or Jamaicans as the case might be, and a glance at the map will quickly reveal the physical obstacles that militate against homogeneity of population; separations of many sorts, geographical, political and cultural tend everywhere to make and crystallize local characteristics.  

This undiscriminating attitude on the part of native Negroes, as well as the friction generated from contact between the two groups, has created an artificial and defensive unity among the islanders which reveals itself in an instinctive closing of their ranks when attacked by outsiders; but among themselves organization along insular lines is the  general rule.  Their social grouping, however, does not follow insular precedents.  Social gradation is determined in the islands by family connections, education, wealth and position.  As each island is a complete society in itself, Negroes occupy from the lowliest to the most exalted positions.  The barrier separating the colored aristocrat from the laboring class of the same color is as difficult to surmount as a similar barrier between Englishmen.  Most of the islanders in New York are from the middle, artisan and laboring classes.  Arriving in a country whose every influence is calculated to democratize their race and destroy the distinctions they had been accustomed to, even those West Indians whose stations in life have been of the lowest soon lose whatever servility they brought with them.  In its place they substitute all of the self-assertiveness of the classes they formerly paid deference to.  

West Indians have been coming to the United States for over a century.  The part they have played in Negro progress is conceded to be important.  As early as 1827 a Jamaican, John Brown Russwurm, one of the founders of Liberia, was the first colored man to be graduated from an American college and to publish a newspaper in this country; sixteen years later his fellow countryman, Peter Ogden, organized in New York City the first Odd-Fellows Lodge for Negroes.  Prior to the Civil War, West Indian contribution to American Negro life was so great that Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his Souls of Black Folk, credits them with main responsibility for the manhood program presented by the race in the early decades of the last century.  Indicative of their tendency to blaze new paths is the achievement of John W. A. Shaw of Antigua who, in the early '90's of the last century, passed the civil service tests and became deputy commissioner of taxes for the County of Queens.  

It is probably not realized, indeed, to what extent West Indian Negroes have contributed to the wealth, power and prestige of the United States.  Major-General Goethals, chief engineer and builder of the Panama Canal, has testified in glowing language to the fact that when all other labor was tried and failed it was the black men of the Caribbean whose intelligence, skill, muscle and endurance made the union of the Pacific and the Atlantic a reality.  

Source: reprinted in Lewis, David Levering.  The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  NY: Penguin Books, 1994

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was a child of the midwest--born and raised in Missouri, lived in Kansas and graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents divorced early; his father became a successful businessman in Mexico.  Hughes’ maternal grandfather was the abolitionist, Charles Langston (see Sourcebook 3, Lesson 14).

Langston Hughes began studies at Columbia, dropped out, traveled widely, and began publishing short stories and poetry. He, along with other black intellectuals of the time, moved towards socialism and Marxism and published works taking that perspective. He wrote works for children and founded theater groups in several major cities, including Harlem, New York.  Hughes has been described as “the most representative writer in the history of African American literature” and as “probably the most original of all black American poets.” (from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, p. 1254) 

The 1920's were the years of Manhattan's black Renaissance.  It began with Shuffle Along, Running Wild, and the Charleston.  Perhaps some people would say even with The Emperor Jones, Charles Gilpin, and the tom-toms at the Provincetown.  But certainly it was the musical revue, Shuffle Along, that gave a scintillating send-off to that Negro vogue in Manhattan, which reached its peak just before the crash of 1929, the crash that sent Negroes, white folks, and all rolling down the hill toward the Works Progress Administration.  

Shuffle Along was a honey of a show.  Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes.  Besides, look who were in it:  The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Still, were a part of the orchestra.  Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show.  Miller and Lyles were the comics.  Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the second act.  Trixie Smith sang "He May Be Your Man But He Comes to See Me Sometimes."  And Caterina Jarboro, now a European prima donna, and the internationally celebrated Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus.  Everybody was in the audience--including me.  People came back to see it innumerable times.  It was always packed.  

To see Shuffle Along was the main reason I wanted to go to Columbia.  When I saw it, I was thrilled and delighted.  From then on I was in the gallery of the Cort Theatre every time I got a chance.  That year, too, I saw Katharine Cornell in A Bill of Divorcement, Margaret Wycherly in The Verge, Maugham's The Circle with Mrs. Leslie Carter, and the Theatre Guild production of Kaiser's From Morn Till Midnight.  But I remember Shuffle Along best of all.  It gave just the proper push--a pre-Charleston kick--to that Negro vogue of the 20's, that spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing.  

Put down the 1920's for the rise of Roland Hayes, who packed Carnegie Hall, the rise of Paul Robeson in New York and London, of Florence Mills over two continents, of Rose McClendon in Broadway parts that never measured up to her, the booming voice of Bessie Smith and the low moan of Clara on thousands of records, and the rise of that grand comedienne of song, Ethel Waters, singing:  "Charlie's elected now!  He's in right for sure!"  Put down the 1920's for Louis Armstrong and Gladys Bentley and Josephine Baker.  

White people began to come to Harlem in droves.  For several years they packed the expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue.  But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites.  They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles.  So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community.  Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundowm, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers--like amusing animals in a zoo.  

The Negroes said:  "We can't go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs.  You won't even let us in your clubs."  But they didn't say it out loud--for Negroes are practically never rude to white people.  So thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses.  

Some of the owners of Harlem clubs, delighted at the flood of white patronage, made the grievous error of barring their own race, after the manner of the famous Cotton Club.  But most of these quickly lost business and folded up, because they failed to realize that a large part of the Harlem attraction for downtown New Yorkers lay in simply watching the colored customers amuse themselves.  And the smaller clubs, of course, had no big floor shows or a name band like the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington usually held forth, so, without black patronage, they were not amusing at all.  

Some of the small clubs, however, had people like Gladys Bentley, who was something worth discovering in those days, before she got famous, acquired an accompanist, specially written material, and conscious vulgarity.  But for two or three amazing years, Miss Bentley sat, and played a big piano all night long, literally all night, without stopping--singing songs like "The St. James Infirmary," from ten in the evening until dawn, with scarcely a break between the notes, sliding from one song to another, with a powerful and continuous underbeat of jungle rhythm.  Miss Bentley was an amazing exhibition of musical energy--a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard--a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.  

But when the place where she played became too well known, she began to sing with an accompanist, became a star, moved to a larger place, then downtown, and is now in Hollywood.  The old magic of the woman and the piano and the night and the rhythm being one is gone.  But everything goes, one way or another.  The '20's are gone and lots of fine things in Harlem night life have disappeared like snow in the sun--since it became utterly commercial, planned for the downtown tourist trade, and therefore dull.  

The lindy-hoppers at the Savoy even began to practise acrobatic routines, and to do absurd things for the entertainment of the whites, that probably never would have entered their heads to attempt merely for their own effortless amusement.  Some of the lindy-hoppers had cards printed with their names on them and became dance professors teaching the tourists.  Then Harlem nights became show nights for the Nordics.  

Some critics say that that is what happened to certain Negro writers, too--that they ceased to write to amuse themselves and began to write to amuse and entertain white people, and in so doing distorted and over-colored their material, and left out a great many things they thought would offend their American brothers of a lighter complexion.  Maybe--since Negroes have writer-racketeers, as has any other race.  But I have known almost all of them, and most of the good ones have tried to be honest, write honestly, and express their world as they saw it.  

All of us know that the gay and sparkling life of the so-called Negro Renaissance of the '20's was not so gay and sparkling beneath the surface as it looked.  Carl Van Vechten, in the character of Byron in N***** Heaven, captured some of the bitterness and frustration of literary Harlem that Wallace Thurman later so effectively poured into his Infants of the Spring--the only novel by a Negro about that fantastic period when Harlem was in vogue.  

Source: reprinted in Lewis, David Levering.  The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  NY: Penguin Books, 1994.

www.americanjourney.psmedia.com/cgi-bin/aj/aj/crosslink.cgi?query=(AADOC3101):docid&arealist=AA&source=INDEX

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was the adopted son of the Rev. Frederick Asbury Cullen, a leading minister in Harlem.  Cullen edited his high school newspaper and published his first poetry at the age of fifteen. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa at New York University and later earned an M.A. from Harvard University.  Cullen published a number of books of poetry and a novel, as well as serving as an editor of Opportunity magazine. Countee Cullen is remembered as a genteel poet, one who took as his models the English Romantics. 

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why the flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind, too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Incident

(For Eric Walrond)
Once riding in old Baltimore
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “N*****.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

Source: Lewis, David Levering.  The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  NY: Penguin Books, 1994.

Claude McKay (1889-1948) was a Jamaica-born poet whose father passed along to his eleven children, cultural memories of the Ashanti of West Africa.  This, together with a suspicion of whites and a strong respect for the sense of community he felt in Jamaica, clearly influenced McKay’s writing. McKay arrived in the United States set to study at Tuskegee, left shortly for Kansas to study agricultural science, and finally moved to Harlem to pursue a career as a writer. He wrote and published poetry, short stories, novels, and an autobiography. Claude McKay worked for social change and spoke out about racism, displaying a frankness not always shared by his contemporaries.

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accused lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Source: Lewis, David Levering.  The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  NY: Penguin Books, 1994.

Zora Neale Hurston, born in Eatonville Florida in 1891, was an anthropologist and a novelist.  She graduated from Barnard College and lived in Harlem during the middle years of the Black Renassaisance.  Hurston published seven books and many shorter works of fiction. Her fame reached its peak in 1943 with the publication of “Dust Tracks” but her work went out of vogue, and she died in 1960 in a welfare home in Florida.  After three decades, Hurston has now been “rediscovered.”  Alice Walker describes Hurston as a symbol of “racial health--a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.”  (quoted in the Afterword for The Complete Stories) 

"You Isie Watts! Git 'own offen dat gate post an' rake up dis yahd!" 

The little brown figure perched upon the gate post looked yearningly up the gleaming shell road that led to Orlando, and down the road that led to Sanford and shrugged her thin shoulders. This heaped kindling on Grandma Potts' already burning ire. 

"Lawd a-mussy! " she screamed, enraged--"Heah Joel, gimme dat wash stick. Ah'll show dat limb of Satan she kain't shake huhseff at me. If she ain't down by de time Ah gets dere, Ah'll break huh down in de lines" (loins). 

"Aw Gran'ma, Ah see Mist' George and Jim Robinson comin' and Ah wanted to wave at 'em," the child said petulantly. 

"You jes wave dat rake at dis heah yahd, madame, else Ah'll take you down a button hole lower. You'se too 'oomanishjumpin' up in everybody's face dat pass." 

This struck the child in a very sore spot for nothing pleased her so much as to sit atop of the gate post and hail the passing vehicles on their way South to Orlando, or North to Sanford. That white shell road was her great attraction She raced up and down the stretch of it that lay before her gate like a round eyed puppy hailing gleefully all travelers. Everybody in the country , white and colored, knew little Isis Watts, the joyful. The Robinson brothers, white cattlemen, were particularly fond of her and always extended a stirrup for her to climb up behind one of them for a short ride, or let her try to crack the long bull whips and yee whoo at the cows.

Grandma Potts went inside and Isis literally waved the rake at the "chaws" of ribbon cane that lay so bountifully about the yard in company with the knots and peelings, with a thick sprinkling of peanut hulls. 

The herd of cattle in their envelope of gray dust came alongside and Isis dashed out to the nearest stirrup and was lifted up. 

"Hello theah Snidlits, I was wonderin' wheah you was," said Jim Robinson as she snuggled down behind him in the saddle They were almost out of the danger zone when Grandma emerged. 

"You Isie-s!" she bawled. 

The child slid down on the opposite side from the house and executed a flank movement through the corn patch that brought her into the yard from behind the privy. 

"You lil' hasion you! Wheah you been?" 

"Out in de back yahd," Isis lied and did a cart wheel and a few fancy steps on her way to the front again. 

"If you doan git tuhdatyahd, Ah make amommuk of you!" Isis observed that Grandma was cutting a fancy assortment of switches from peach, guana and cherry trees. 

She finished the yard by raking everything under the edge of the porch and began a romp with the dogs, those lean, floppy eared 'coon hounds that all country folks keep. But Grandma vetoed this also. 

"Isie, you set 'own on dat porch! Uh great big 'leben yeah ole gal racin' an' rompin' lak dat--set 'own!" 

Isis impatiently flung herself upon the steps. 

"Git up olfa dem steps, you aggavatin' limb, 'fore Ah git dem hick'ries tuh you, an' set yo' self on a cheah." 

Isis petulantly arose and sat down as violently as possible in a chair, but slid down until she all but sat upon her shoulder blades. 

"Now look atcher," Grandma screamed. "Put yo' knees together, an' git up olfen yo' backbone! Lawd, you know dis hellion is gwine make me stomp huh insides out." 

Isis sat bolt upright as if she wore a ramrod down her back and began to whistle. Now there are certain things that Grandma Potts felt no one of this female persuasion should do—one was to sit with the knees separated, "set tin' brazen" she called it; another was whistling, another playing with boys, neither must a lady cross her legs. 

Up she jumped from her seat to get the switches. 

"So youse whistlin' in mah face, huh!" She glared till her eyes were beady and Isis bolted for safety. But the noon hour brought John Watts, the widowed father, and this excused the child from sitting for criticism. 

Being the only girl in the family, of course she must wash the dishes, which she did in intervals between frolics with the dogs. She even gave Jake, the puppy, a swim in the dishpan by holding him suspended above the water that reeked of "pot likker"--just high enough so that his feet would be immersed. The deluded puppy swam and swam without ever crossing the pan, much to his annoyance. 

Hearing Grandma she hurriedly dropped him on the floor, which he tracked up with feet wet with dishwater. Grandma took her patching and settled down in the front room to sew. She did this every afternoon, and invariably slept in the big red rocker with her head lolled back over the back, the sewing falling from her hand. 

Isis had crawled under the center table with its red plush cover with little round balls for fringe. She was lying on her back imagining herself various personages. She wore trailing robes, golden slippers with blue bottoms. She rode white horses with flaring pink nostrils to the horizon, for she still believed that to be land's end. She was picturing herself gazing over the edge of the world into the abyss when the spool of cotton fell from Grandma's lap and rolled away under the whatnot. 

Isis drew back from her contemplation of the nothingness at the horizon and glanced up at the sleeping woman. Her head had fallen far back. She breathed with a regular "snark" intake and soft "poosah" exhaust. But Isis was a visual minded child. She heard the snores only subconsciously but she saw straggling beard on Grandma's chin, trembling a little with every "snark" and "poosah." 

They were long gray hairs curled here and there against the dark brown skin. Isis was moved with pity for her mother's mother. 

"Poah Gran-ma needs a shave," she murmured, and set about it. Just then Joel, next older than Isis, entered with a can of bait. 

"Come on Isie, les' we all go fishin'. The perch is bitin' fine in Blue Sink." "

“Sh-sh--" cautioned his sister, "Ah got to shave Gran'ma." 

"Who say so?" Joel asked, surprised. 

"Nobody doan hafta tell me. Look at her chin. No ladies don't weah no whiskers if they kin help it. But Gran'ma gittin' ole an' she doan know how to shave like me." 

The conference adjourned to the back porch lest Grandma wake. 

"Aw, Isie, you doan know nothin' 'bout shavin' a-tall--but a man lak me--" 

"Ah do so know." 

"You don't not. Ah'm goin' shave her mahseff." 

"Naw, you won't neither, Smarty. Ah saw her first an' thought it all up first," Isis declared, and ran to the calico covered box on the wall above the wash basin and seized her father's razor. Joel was quick and seized the mug and brush. 

"Now!" Isis cried defiantly, "Ah got the razor." 

"Goody, goody, goody, pussy cat, Ah got th' brush an' you can't shave 'thout lather--see! Ah know mo' than you," Joel retorted. 

"Aw, who don't know dat?" Isis pretended to scorn. But seeing her progress blocked for lack of lather she compromised. 

"Ah know! Les' we all shave her. You lather an' Ah shave." 

This was agreeable to Joel. He made mountains of lather and anointed his own chin, and the chin of Isis and the dogs, splashed the walls and at last was persuaded to lather Grandma's chin. Not that he was loath but he wanted his new plaything to last as long as possible. 

Isis stood on one side of the chair with the razor clutched cleaver fashion. The niceties of razor-handling had passed over her head. The tiling with her was to hold the razor-sufficient in itself. 

Joel splashed on the lather in great gobs and Grandma awoke. For one bewildered moment she stared at the grinning boy with the brush and mug but sensing another presence, she turned to behold the business face of Isis and the razor-clutching hand. Her jaw dropped and Grandma, forgetting years and rheumatism, bolted from the chair and fled the house, screaming.

"She's gone to tell papa, Isis. You didn't have no business wid his razor and he's gonna lick yo hide," Joel cried, running to replace mug and brush. 

"You too, chuckle-head, you, too," retorted Isis. "You was playin' wid his brush and put it all over the dogs--Ah seen you put it on Ned an' Beulah." Isis shaved some slivers from the door jamb with the razor and replaced it in the box. Joel took his bait and pole and hurried to Blue Sink. Isis crawled under the house to brood over the whipping she knew would come. She had meant well. 

But sounding brass and tinkling cymbal drew her forth. The local lodge of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows led by a braying, thudding band, was marching in full regalia down the road. She had forgotten the barbecue and log-rolling to be held today for the benefit of the new hall. 

Music to Isis meant motion. In a minute razor and whipping forgotten, she was doing a fair imitation of the Spanish dancer she had seen in a medicine show some time before. Isis' feet were gifted--she could dance most anything she saw. 

Up, up went her spirits, her brown little feet doing all sorts of intricate things and her body in rhythm, hand curving above her head. But the music was growing faint. Grandma nowhere in sight. She stole out of the gate, running and dancing after the band. 

Then she stopped. She couldn't dance at the carnival. Her dress was torn and dirty. She picked a long stemmed daisy and thrust it behind her ear. But the dress, no better. Oh, an idea! In the battered round topped trunk in the bedroom! 

She raced back to the house, then, happier, raced down the white dusty road to the picnic grove, gorgeously clad. People laughed good naturedly at her, the band played and Isis danced because she couldn't help it. A crowd of children gathered admiringly about her as she wheeled lightly about, hand on hip, flower between her teeth with the red and white fringe of the tablecloth--Grandma's new red table-cloth that she wore in lieu of a Spanish shawl--trailing in the dust. It was too ample for her meager form, but she wore it like a gypsy. Her brown feet twinkled in and out of the fringe. Some grown people joined the children about her. The Grand Exalted Ruler rose to speak; the band was hushed, but Isis danced on, the crowd clapping their hands for her. No one listened to the Exalted one, for little by little the multitude had surrounded the brown dancer. 

An automobile drove up to the Crown and halted. Two white men and a lady got out and pushed into the crowd, suppressing mirth discreetly behind gloved hands. Isis looked up and waved them a magnificent hail and went on dancing until—

Grandma had returned to the house and missed Isis and straightway sought her at the festivities expecting to find her in her soiled dress, shoeless, gaping at the crowd, but what she saw drove her frantic. Here was her granddaughter dancing before a gaping crowd in her brand new red table-cloth, and reeking of lemon extract, for Isis had added the final touch to her costume. She must have perfume. 

Isis saw Grandma and bolted. She heard her cry. "Mah Gawd, mah brand new table-cloth Ah jus' bought rum O'landah!" as she fled through the crowd and on into the woods. 

II

She followed the little creek until she came to the ford in a rutty wagon road that led to Apopka and laid down on the cool grass at the roadside. The April sun was quite hot. 

Misery , misery and woe settled down upon her and the child wept. She knew another whipping was in store for her. 

"Oh, Ah wish Ah could die, then Gran'ma an' papa would be sorry they beat me so much. Ah b'leeve Ah'll run away an' never go home no mo'. Ah'm goin' drown mahseff in th' creek!" Her woe grew attractive. 

Isis got up and waded into the water. She routed out a tiny 'gator and a huge bull frog. She splashed and sang, enjoying herself immensely. The purr of a motor struck her ear and she saw a large, powerful car jolting along the rutty road toward her. It stopped at the water's edge. 

"Well, I declare, it's our little gypsy," exclaimed the man at the wheel. "What are you doing here, now?" 

"Ah'm killin' mahseff," Isis declared dramatically, "cause Gran'ma beats me too much."

There was a hearty burst of laughter from the machine. 

“You’ll last sometime the way you are going about it. Is this the way to Maitland? We want to go to the Park Hotel." 

Isis saw no longer any reason to die. She came up out of the water, holding up the dripping fringe of the table-cloth. 

"Naw, indeedy. You go to Maitlan' by the shell road--it goes by mah house--an' turnoff at Lake Sebelia to the clay road that takes you right to the do'." 

"Well," went on the driver, smiling furtively, "could you quit dying long enough to go with us?" 

"Yessuh," she said thoughtfully, " Ah wanta go wid you." 

The door of the car swung open. She was invited to a seat beside the driver. She had often dreamed of riding in one of these heavenly chariots but never thought she would, actually. 

"Jump in then, Madame Tragedy, and show us. We lost ourselves after we left your barbecue." 

During the drive Isis explained to the kind lady who smelt faintly of violets and to the indifferent men that she was really a princess. She told them about her trips to the horizon, about the trailing gowns, the gold shoes with blue bottoms--she insisted on the blue bottoms--the white charger, the time when she was Hercules and had slain numerous dragons and sundry giants. At last the car approached her gate over which stood the umbrella China-berry tree. The car was abreast of the gate and had all but passed when Grandma spied her glorious tablecloth lying back against the upholstery of the Packard.

"You Isie-e!" she bawled. "You lil' wretch you! Come heah dis instunt." 

"That's me," the child confessed, mortified, to the lady on the rear seat. 

"Oh, Sewell, stop the car. This is where the child lives. I hate to give her up though." 

"Do you wanta keep me?" Isis brightened. 

"Oh, I wish I could, you shining little morsel. Wait, I'll try to save you a whipping this time."

She dismounted with the gaudy lemon flavored culprit and advanced to the gate where Grandma stood glowering, switches in hand. 

"You're gointuh ketchit f'um yo' haid to yo' heels m'lady. Jes' come in heah." 

“Why, good afternoon,” she accosted the furious grandparent. 

"You're not going to whip this poor little thing, are you?" the lady asked in conciliatory tones. 

"Yes, Ma'am. She's de wustest lil' link that ever drawed bref Jes' look at mah new table-cloth, dat ain't never been washed. She done traipsed all over de woods, uh dancin' an' uh prancin' in it She done took a razor to me t'day an' Lawd knows whut mo'." 

Isis clung to the white hand fearfully. 

"Ah wuzn't gointer hurt Gran'ma, miss--Ah wuz jus' gointer shave her whiskers fuh huh 'cause she's old an' can't." 

The white hand closed tightly over the little brown one that was quite soiled. She could understand a voluntary act of love even though it miscarried. 

"Now, Mrs. er—er--I didn't get the name--how much did your table-cloth cost?" 

"One whole big silvah dollar down at O'landah--ain't had it a week yit." 

"Now here's five dollars to get another one. The little thing loves laughter. I want her to go on to the hotel and dance in that table-cloth for me. I can stand a little light today--" 

"Oh, yessum, yessum," Grandma cut in. "Everything's alright, sho' she kin go, yessum." 

The lady went on. ' 'I want brightness and this Isis is joy itself, why she's drenched in light!" 

Isis for the first time in her life, felt herself appreciated and danced up and down in an ecstasy of joy for a minute. 

"Now, behave yo'seff, Isie, ovah at de hotel wid de white folks," Grandma cautioned, pride in her voice, though she strove to hide it. "Lawd, ma'am, dat gal keeps me so frackshus, Ah doan know mah haid f’um mah feet. Ah orter comb huh haid, too, befo' she go wid you all." 

"No, no, don't bother. I like her as she is. I don't think she'd like it either, being combed and scrubbed. Come on, Isis." 

Feeling that Grandma had been somewhat squelched did not detract from Isis' spirit at all. She pranced over to the waiting motor and this time seated herself on the rear seat between the sweet, smiling lady and the rather aloof man in gray." 

Ah'm gointer stay wid you all," she said with a great deal of warmth, and snuggled up to her benefactress. "Want me tuh sing a song fuh you?" 

"There, Helen, you've been adopted," said the man with a short, harsh laugh. 

"Oh, I hope so, Harry." She put her arm about the red draped figure at her side and drew it close until she felt the warm puffs of the child's breath against her side. She looked hungrily ahead of her and spoke into space rather than to anyone in the car. "I want a little of her sunshine to soak into my soul. I need it." 

Source: Hurston, Zora Neale. The Complete Stories. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995