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THE SLEEPER WAKES -- HARLEM RENAISSANCE STORIES BY WOMEN |
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FOREWORD The Harlem Renaissance! When and how did it begin? When and why did it come to an end? Was it a period when black arts flourished or one in which the most creative of the race sold their talents for the proverbial mess of pottage? Was it really a renaissance of black expressive culture, another time when black was beautiful, or merely an interlude when rich white people, bored with their own lives, indulged their fancies and fantasies with the perceived exoticism of people of African heritage? These and other questions interrogating the value of the most talked-about movement in black culture persist for scholars of African-American history, literature, arts, and politics. Most critics agree there are no definitive opening or ending dates for the period, while debates on the whys of its existence are not altogether settled either. Most critics also agree that something different from what had previously existed happened in black arts between the last years of the second decade of this century and the beginning of its fourth. And it was a renaissance, for there was a time in the nineteenth century when black writing flourished, at least in America. [1] In our time, the intellectual study of the Harlem Renaissance as a phenomenon in African-American culture has now been around for many decades, yet the subject remains inexhaustible. This, in spite of the many perspectives from which it has been approached. "Here is The New Negro (1925)!" exclaimed Alain Locke's anthology that introduced the work, critical and artistic, of the principal players on a newly unveiled stage, while James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan (1930) documented the development of the black capital of America. For Arna Bontemps, who was there when it happened, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972) framed his nostalgia in his edited collection of scholarly essays on those larger-than-life characters who were there too. Harlem Renaissance (1971), unembellished, was Nathan Huggins's excellent historical evaluation of the period, followed by Jervis Anderson's This Was Harlem (1981) and David Levering Lewis's swift-moving rendition, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981). A list of books on the subject could be many times as long as that given here: bibliographies, dictionaries, histories, and literary and historical criticism; and the essays on the actors in this play and the reviews of its failures and successes are legion. The Harlem Renaissance continues to engage the imagination of many, with the multiplicity of viewpoints their interests generate. In the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student and knew very little about the Harlem Renaissance, I discovered and became enamored with the Crisis and Opportunity magazines -- journals deserving enormous credit for the stupendous job they accomplished in preserving the history and achievements of black America in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the Crisis came into being in 1910 and continues to exist, and Opportunity had a life span of more than two-and-a-half decades (1923-1949), the 1920s and early 1930s were their most successful years. I recall the long hours I spent in window seats in the musty bowels of the library, reading, no, drinking in the story recorded in these publications. The information that came to me pleased, horrified, and fascinated me: from the accounts of white atrocities against black people to the pictures and stories that celebrated black successes; the rallying calls for black action against their oppressors -- the poems, short stories, book reviews, and dramatic pieces; photographs of paintings and sculpture by black artists; accounts of weddings, funerals, college and high school graduations; and from a black perspective, reports and editorials on current events that had meaning to the lives of everyone in our country. These journals represented diaries of a race -- a running group history recorded as events unfolded. They were full of the kind of information that neither my high school, or undergraduate, or graduate school educations had bothered to fill me in on: information about me. At the time, despite the demands of a graduate program to complete and my need to tend to the myriad anxieties I had about the future I faced, I made mental note of a project I hoped someday to return to and engage: work on a collection of Crisis and Opportunity short fiction of the Harlem Renaissance. Looking back on that moment in my life now, I think of how swiftly the years have slipped by, and that the time was never right for me to return to the note -- until now -- not to fulfill it as I once anticipated I would, but to observe the significance of the step that a new researcher has taken in a direction I could not have imagined in the early 1970s. Marcy Knopf's The Sleeper Awakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women, a far advance from the project I envisioned then marks another landmark in the study of Afro-American writings, of Afro-American women's writings, and of the Harlem Renaissance. The Sleeper Wakes, a selection of twenty-eight stories by fourteen women who published not only in the Crisis and Opportunity (the major black journals of their day), but also in much less well known black magazines, is the first book of its kind. For these women there were both the courage to write and the courage to make sure they published wherever they could. [2] Why did we have to wait so long for this anthology? Although by the early 1970s a generation of black feminist scholars, newly entering literary studies, were beginning to raise the banner for the writings of black women, in the context of the times, with Black Studies and [white] Women's Studies struggling to claim legitimacy as intellectual fields of endeavor, the position of black women's writings was marginal to group concerns of gender and race. Throughout much of that decade their writings (past and contemporary) were difficult to come by, not for want of a corpus, but because they were victims of the flagrant disregard of those works by the sources with the power to make them available. Not until its closing years, as a result of the pressing agitation of black women writers and critics, did publishers and others begin to change their attitudes toward black women's writings. As strange as it might seem today, because of the place some of these writers now occupy in the public consciousness, Zora Neale Hurston's novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God, were out of print until well into the mid 1970s. In 1979, even after the publication of and the acclaim she had won for Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula were out of print, and remained so until the early 1980s. In the earliest university courses on black women writers almost all of the materials available to students and faculty were photocopies of long out-of- print texts. After all that has happened, it is difficult not to conclude that black women's texts disappeared from publishers' lists because of a perception by marketing departments of a general lack of interest in books by and about black women and girls. The long struggle for recognition of the value of black women's writings, especially on black women's lives and experiences, until recently, is the story of the persistence that characterizes a tradition that enabled black women of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth to disregard the absence or presence of an audience for their works, and to find in the process of writing itself the rewards for the task. Black women in America, we now know, have been writing for a long time: from the often maligned "Bars Fight" by Lucy Terry in 1746, [3] to the women in the 1980s and 1990s who earn Pulitzer prizes and MacArthur grants and other national and international awards. During the summer of 1992, journalists and others observed in wonder the strange phenomenon of books by three black women on national best-seller lists. More significant for many of us in black women's literature, however, is our knowledge of the determined consistency that over the span of two centuries produced this group. For a long time this was not known, but the recent Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women's Writings, another landmark event in publication history, makes it impossible for anyone unwillingly to remain ignorant of this body of literature. But if the Schomburg Library opened up a general awareness of black women's writings of the nineteenth century, there is still much to be learned of their literary productiveness during the early part of this century. The Sleeper Wakes takes a valuable step in that direction. Standard histories of the Harlem Renaissance, such as those mentioned at the beginning of this Foreword, do little to inform readers of the special contributions of women to the period. Although it is true that individual writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Dorothy West, and others have received respectable critical attention within the past ten years, not enough has yet been done on how women artists as a group contributed to the movement as a whole. Toward that end, Daphne Duval Harrison's Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (1988), which throws light on more than a hundred "lost" women blues singers of the era; Maureen Honey's Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (1989); and Gloria T. Hull's Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987) are immensely important. A good source for identification of women of the time is Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900-1945 (1990) by Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolf. [4] The Sleeper Wakes, a carefully balanced anthology, truly enhances efforts to bring the lives and experiences of black women writers into our lives and classrooms and to the consciousness of today's readers. Some of the authors included, like Hurston, Fauset, and Larsen, are already well known to those familiar with black women writers of the earlier part of this century. They are like familiar old friends to us. Some of their stories in this collection are already anthologized and may be known to some readers; the others will be like pleasant secrets in their lives we are only now discovering. But several of these writers have not appeared other than in the journals in which they were first published, and their names and works are virtually unknown to most people. This mixture of the known and unknown is an excellent menu for giving us a new look at the Harlem Renaissance. The stories cover the variety of experiences that over time have defined the identities of black women in America. The majority explore events and ideas in the domestic sphere where the survival of individuals and the group occurs amidst an entanglement of intraracial relationships that are not always nurturing or supportive. To a large extent, literally and figuratively, the women represented here wrote to address the struggles of women and sometimes men at the intersection of race and gender, even when this does not always seem apparent in their narratives. Themes range from the problems that skin color and/or "passing" raise, and how they affect some people, topics that were popular during the Renaissance, to the reaction of a mother who, like Toni Morrison's Sethe in her renowned novel Beloved, decides to kill her child rather than have him live only to suffer the horrors of America's system of racial injustice. The deadendedness and despair of poverty in the lives of lower-class blacks in such stories as Dorothy West's prizewinning "The Typewriter" is balanced by others like Leila Amos Pendleton's "The Foolish and the Wise," in which a domestic servant named Sallie refuses even to consider that Cleopatra and Socrates might be white since she will not permit whites to rob blacks of ownership of intelligence and accomplishments. Knopf observes too that many of these narratives appear to be trial runs of the early ideas of some authors who also wrote novels, as many of the themes in their stories reappear in their long fiction. But The Sleeper Wakes and the studies of women in the Renaissance cited above are only the beginning of the work that must be done if black women in the arts during the Harlem Renaissance and later, including writers, are to receive their just due in the critical literature of our time. The Sleeper Wakes reinforces the urgency of the need for books such as this one. These stories reveal a great deal at the intersection of life and art in the lives of black women: on one hand, they give us a cross-section of the social and sociological concerns of urban black women in America during the 1920s and 1930s; and on the other, they provide insight into black women's efforts to develop an aesthetic which, that historical time, would accommodate, without compromise, the artistic productions of a group that was neither white nor male. How much of their goal they achieved and how well they accomplished it is left to the critics to decide, but our literature is certainly richer because of this new and exciting anthology. _______________ 1. See William L. Andrews, "The 1850" The First Afro-American Literary Renaissance," in Literary Romanticism in America, ed. William L. Andrews (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), pp. 38-60. 2. In her "Introduction" to this collection, Marcy Knopf notes that the young Dorothy West published in the local black Boston literary magazine, The Saturday Evening Quill, and that Gwendolyn Bennett's "Wedding Day" first appeared in the short-lived Fire!!. On the one hand, placing their work in these magazines indicates the difficulties these women faced in finding suitable publication outlets, on the other, it suggests their determination to be published writers, and their self-confidence on that issue. 3. Lucy Terry, a slave in Deerfield, Massachusetts, authored the oldest extant writing by a person of African origin in this country. In 1746, when she was sixteen years old, an Indian raid on her village inspired her to write a poem describing the massacre. Her account is the most complete historical document of that incident. Preposterously, some critics dismiss this eighteenth-century slave woman's writing for her shortcomings as a poet. 4. A number of books focussing on black women in the Harlem Renaissance are currently in progress. These include Cheryl Wall's study of women of letters of the Harlem Renaissance, forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
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