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Marita Bonner (occoMy) (June 16, 1898–december 6, 1971) kimberly n. ruffin Born in 1898, Marita Bonner’s life and writing career are marked by the imprint of three different cities: Boston, Washington, D.C., and most extensively, Chicago. Rather than focus on the lives of the middle-class Blacks that her own life mirrored, Bonner chose to highlight the lives of the Black working class, leading critics to characterize her work as “proletarian fiction.” The New Negro discourse of the early 1900s from intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke encouraged Black writers to counteract racist thinking and institutions with “racial uplift,” which provided upstanding portraits of Black life. Bonner chose to concentrate on the desperate situations in which the masses of Blacks found themselves. Her writing embodies a keen sensitivity to the experiences of those who transformed their lives with movement from rural, southern locales to northern and western cities during the Great Migration (one of the largest voluntary movements of people in history). Blacks seeking improved employment opportunities and less exposure to racist oppression and violence carved out new lives in northern cities such as Chicago (which was a common destination for Blacks from Mississippi) and western cities such as Los Angeles. While their expectations were sometimes met, most would endure immense environmental and cultural dislocation that caused anxiety, discord, and economic uncertainty. Published in The Crisis magazine (funded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and Opportunity magazine (funded by the National Urban League), Bonner was a strong presence in artistic efforts to document , publicize, and improve the lives of African Americans whose lives were forever altered by this switch from rural to urban life. As an early contributor to the Black Chicago Renaissance, she amplified the struggles of new arrivals to urban worlds that had demanding circumstances and emphasized the power of environmental influence to shape and sometimes determine human potential. Bonner’s upbringing by her parents, Joseph Andrew and Mary Anne (Noel) Bonner, shielded her from the severe consequences of racism experienced by 84 • kiMBerly n. rUffin most of her characters. Benefiting from the economic buffer of a middle-class home, Bonner’s movement from city to city was relatively smooth. Throughout her childhood education in the Boston area, she demonstrated academic excellence and artistic accomplishment as a pianist. Her writing career blossomed during her years at Brookline High School where she contributed regularly to a student magazine. Noticed for her writing skill, she was encouraged to apply to Radcliffe College, where she majored in English and comparative literature (she was fluent in German). Bonner, along with other Black students, was not allowed to live on campus, so she commuted from home. During her college years she was able to secure a position in a prestigious writing seminar with Charles Townsend Copeland and win two Radcliffe song competitions (1918, 1922). Before graduating from college (in 1922) she began a teaching career, which she continued with a position at the Bluefield Colored Institute in Bluefield , Virginia, after obtaining her degree. Bonner’s first nationally published short story, “The Hands,” appeared in Opportunity magazine in 1925; her first nationally published essay, “On Being Black—a Woman—and Colored,” appeared in The Crisis magazine that same year. These two inaugural publications signal thematic foci that recur in Bonner’s later work. In “The Hands” the narrator develops a brief story about the hands of a fellow bus rider playing a game the narrator calls “Christ-in-all-men.”1 The game inclines the narrator to ennoble and embellish the life of the man based on the appearance of his hands. The sketch the narrator paints is of a hardworking male laborer whose life the narrator anchors in the action of his hands, following him from his youth, adulthood, marriage, fatherhood, and death with actions such as “shoveled,” “patted,” “soothed,” “smoothed,” and “steadied.”2 Along with the focus on a member of the Black working class, the story includes theological references that resurface in Bonner’s writing. “On Being Black—a Woman—and Colored,” an essay that has received much attention since 1989, takes an autobiographical detour into discussing the lives of the Black working class. Bonner begins this essay with second-person narration broadly describing the idealistic expectations of the young, middle- or upper-class, Black woman who is “covered with sundry Latin phrases”3 after her college graduation. Her all-inclusive hopes for career, home, and husband (foreshadowing the “have...

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