Unfinished Masterpiece: The Harlem Renaissance Fiction of Anita Scott Coleman, and: Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance: The Life and Writings of Anita Scott Coleman (review)

ANITA SCOTT. Ca. 1915. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Anita Scott Coleman family collection.

“For here [in the West] prevails for every man be he white or black a hardier philosophy—and a bigger and better chance, that is not encountered elsewhere in these United States,” wrote Anita Scott Coleman in 1926 (Western Echoes 285). A black woman born in 1890 in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, where her family had migrated from Florida, Coleman was no naïve idealist about the black man’s—or woman’s—chances. Major themes in her fiction and poetry were discrimination, prejudice, lack of opportunity, yet her work is optimistic and positive, her female characters sharing “her own quiet confidence and sense of self worth,” unlike the “tragic, dissatisfied, or demoralized young women” in the work of many of her black contemporaries; her male characters are sympathetic, her families strong and supportive (Western Echoes 19). Davis and Mitchell convincingly tie Coleman’s themes to her distinctively western family life in the Southwest: she moved from Mexico to the frontier town of Silver City, New Mexico, where “colored pioneers” were welcome and where she listened to her father’s friends discuss the “Race Question,” and later with her husband and children to a strong and stable black community in Los Angeles (Western Echoes 12, 17): in her work “home is not a restive space or a domestic prison for women, or even an escape from racist reality, but a site of agency for the African American family. Home thus functions as both a response to and a goal of migration and diaspora” (5). Responding in part to the “persistent attempt to eradicate the black presence in the West” in US history, Coleman “foregrounds her own family’s history” while, ironically, never writing directly about herself (14, 5).

In their introductions, both sets of editors of these collections argue for the importance of recovering Coleman’s work, providing lists of her many awards conferred during her lifetime, suggesting that she deserves to be read alongside Langston Hughes, Pauline Hopkins, and other black contemporaries. Davis and Mitchell present the far more compelling case, offering the reader a host of historical, cultural, and critical contexts in which to see a richness and political assertiveness in her work perhaps not immediately discernable to today’s readers. Champion and Glasrud should be credited for writing one of the first critical articles on Coleman, but in their short introduction, they present her fiction largely within the context of the Harlem Renaissance writers, and, while they find some “innovative narrative techniques” in some of her later stories, they dismiss other stories as having “didactive endings” and other flaws (12). In contrast, Davis and Mitchell’s detailed analysis of the themes and style of Coleman’s works make their audience enthusiastic to read them; led by them, I too saw her echoing Hughes and W. E. B. DuBois, recognized her subtle irony, and enjoyed her use of western tropes including confidence men and exaggeration.

Davis and Mitchell also spent years on careful biographical research. While Champion and Glasrud assert that “biographical details about her life are lacking,” Davis and Mitchell patiently use census reports and documents to discover the true facts about Coleman’s ancestry as well as to track down many descendants for interviews, family members who share unpublished documents (such as an autobiographical fragment written by her daughter) and a host of revealing photographs (including the one which precedes this review) (6). This information is valuable in and of itself because Coleman’s life as a black woman...