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135 chapter three Power & Profession RICHARD WRIGHT’S MISSISSIPPI & ITS EXPATRIATE LEGACIES i. cultural geography and a black professional writer The mind learns to grapple with spatial relations long after the body has mastered them in performance. But the mind, once on its exploratory path, creates large and complex spatial schemata that exceed by far what an individual can encompass through direct experience. With the help of the mind, human spatial ability . . . rises above that of all other species. —yi-fu tuan, Space and Place (1977) In a speech presented on 2 June 1939, Langston Hughes told the Third Annual Writers’ Congress: “It is hard for a Negro to become a professional writer. Magazine offices, daily newspapers, publishers’ offices are tightly closed to us in America.”1 This assessment by the major black writer in America at the end of the 1930s came as no surprise to other black writers who, inspired by the cultural awakening of the New Negro Renaissance in the mid-1920s, had attempted to support themselves by writing. Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Hughes himself, and their compatriots soon had discovered not only that the “vogue” for racial materials was amazingly brief, but also that the opportunities for black employment in the world of letters were largely absent. The writers understood that their exclusion was due to racism; for example, in an effort to erase the difficulty of a black presence in a white office setting, Fauset offered an out for any publisher interested in hiring her: “[I]f the question of color should come up I could of course work at home.”2 Hughes made his observation about the difficulty of becoming a professional writer at a critical juncture in the nation’s cultural history, when the decade-long economic pressures precipitated by the stock market crash of 1929 had nearly decimated the developing ranks of black writers, yet after the POWER & PROFESSION|136| institutional process for assisting writers, the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, had been initiated. Though Hughes never participated in the Writers’ Project, he delivered his speech to a Carnegie Hall audience that included a young black writer from Mississippi who did: Richard Nathaniel Wright. Wright, in recounting his early life in Mississippi, would write: “I had no hope of becoming a professional man.”3 Mississippi was the geographical no-man’s-land for blacks of Wright’s generation, despite the fact that many of them had the desire to write. In addressing the Federal Writers’ Project and its ability to alter the hopes of a black man from Mississippi, I call attention to the way in which institutional space intersects with geographical space to reconfigure, modify, or create social conditions that in turn make possible new social, political, or cultural action. The several generations of black writers who ground their productions in the real and imagined space “Mississippi” would owe much to Wright directly and to the Federal Writers’ Project indirectly. Shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (wpa) in May 1935 as a means to provide Depression-era Americans with jobs on building projects throughout the nation, the Federal Arts Project instituted its programs to put artists, musicians, writers, librarians , and teachers to work in their fields of expertise and to reduce their numbers on the relief rolls. When activated at the state level, the Federal Arts Project of the wpa included a variety of programs, including a Theater Project and a Writers’ Project. What the Federal Writers’ Project (fwp) as an institution enabled was the circumstance within a reconfigured spatial location by which Wright and others who were raced “Negro” in the 1930s could develop vocational ambitions and personal desires and become members of the writing profession. For Wright and those others, the fwp provided a movement into a public sphere that might otherwise have remained closed to them. Two years before the Writers’ Congress, Wright had arrived in New York from Chicago, where he had begun a writing career with the encouragement of the John Reed Club and, importantly, in 1935 with employment in the Illinois fwp. Ralph Ellison, whom Wright mentored at the end of the 1930s, has observed that “[t]hrough his cultural and political activities in Chicago [Wright] made a dialectical leap into a sense of his broadest possibilities, as a man and as artist.”4 Margaret Walker, who worked with Wright on the Illinois Writers...

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