On Time, In Time, Through Time: Aaron Douglas, Fire!! and the Writers of the Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas's associations with writers of the Harlem Renaissance are many and the resulting collaborations, whether in the form of dust jackets or illustrations, have bequeathed us a body of work deserving far greater critical attention. The dust jackets he designed for many of the movement's leading lights are proof. He illustrated James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1927) and God's Trombones (1925), Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1927), Arthur Huff Fauset's For Freedom (1927), and Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter (1930). Douglas however, was much more than an illustrator of Harlem Renaissance publications. He was also a major architect of the intellectual and aesthetic contours of the New Negro Movement as well. So, when we speak of his collaborations with writers we must see him as an equal partner in shaping the aesthetic and political vision of the time as well.

This essay focuses on Douglas' work on the brilliant but short-lived publication, FIRE!!, which appeared only once in November 1926. Nonetheless, it remains a lasting document of the period. After a brief overview of the context in which the journal was created I will turn my attention to Douglas' interior set of three drawings and the cover (Figures 5–8). This exploration of Douglas' work on FIRE!! will reveal his importance not only as a visual artist but also as a critical and historical thinker as well.

On Time

The story of FIRE!! is one of the legendary tales of the renaissance. Having been supported, nurtured, chided, and chastened by their elders, a group of educated, cosmopolitan young artists—migrants most—came together to produce a high quality, if incendiary publication. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, Aaron Douglas, Arthur Huff Fauset, Countee Cullen, and Arna Bontemps were the most serious, disciplined and talented of their generation; they gave of their time, talent, and treasure to produce a journal containing fiction, drama, essays, and visual imagery that focuses on black folk in both the urban and rural contexts. Born from a number of conversations, correspondences, and a few manifestoes, the work was what Douglas biographer Amy Helene Kirschke has called "the epitome of collaboration in the Harlem Renaissance."¹ Group meetings at Hurston's or the Douglas's, where they edited manuscripts and made design decisions, resulted in a gem of a journal conceived and produced by black people free of the guiding hand of Opportunity, Crisis, DuBois, Charles Johnson, Charlotte Osgood Mason, and Alain Locke.

The journal succeeded in shattering expectations of respectability; expectations that confined the representation of the Negro, expectations born in struggle against the violence, both discursive and literal, of American racial stereotypes.

Douglas was not only, nor even, the illustrator of FIRE!!. He was central in helping to shape the intellectual and aesthetic vision of the publication and in guiding the interventions its editors hoped to make. While Langston Hughes's essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1922)² is rightly hailed as the manifesto of his generation and the call to which FIRE!! was a response, his was certainly not the only manifesto. These were manifesto-writing times!! Perhaps not like the politically radical calls to action that would follow in the 1930s, but this group of artists were thinking, meeting, and writing about the responsibility of their generation with great passion and conviction. Zora Neale Hurston wrote constantly, especially to Langston Hughes. At one point she even wrote that she thought she'd found a better painter than Douglas. (The painter was Joe Mitchell.)³ While it is not surprising that poets, novelists, and essayists wrote such pieces, Douglas also penned his own aesthetic statements as well. In a letter dated December 21, 1925 and written to Hughes, he wrote:

Your problem dear Langston, my problem, no our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painted black.… Let's bare our arms and plunge deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through...