“New Negro” v. “Niggeratti”: Defining and Defiling the Black Messiah

Allow me to propose two visual bookends to the Harlem Renaissance: Winold Reiss’s “The Brown Madonna,” which served as frontispiece to Alain Locke’s landmark anthology The New Negro (1925), and “Mary Madonna,” a 1930 drawing by Richard Bruce Nugent (figs. 1–2). Despite their similar titles, these pictures could hardly be more different. Reiss’s Madonna wears blue, in keeping with traditional iconography of the Virgin; a pale nimbus radiates from her figure, contributing to the portrait’s sacramental valence. She gazes chastely to one side, holding in her arms the (Christ) child who seems to incarnate that “New Negro” announced in large letters on the adjacent title page—herald of the race’s cultural renascence in and through art. (Locke himself likely chose the image’s typological caption.)¹ In contrast, Nugent’s Mary stares directly at us with weary, licentious eyes. This racially indeterminate nude seems more Magdalene than Madonna, more erotic than maternal; two colorful triangles converge at her pelvis, calling attention to what may or may not be a site of holy reproduction.²

In either case, this transgressive Madonna hardly conforms to the ideal of bourgeois acceptability endemic to programs of “racial uplift” generally and to the ethos so carefully crafted five years earlier by Locke’s anthology. If Reiss’s Madonna functions, in Marlon Ross’s words, as an “allegory of spirituality purified of suggestive sexuality,” Nugent’s does the opposite: its suggestive sexuality “purifies” the image of its allegorical and spiritual freight.³ How, indeed, can this drawing claim to depict the Madonna at all, especially given the perplexing absence of a child? The baby that functions in Reiss’s portrait as emblem of the nascent New Negro has disappeared from Nugent’s vision—just as it disappears from The New Negro itself. For along with Reiss’s sixteen other sketches and portraits that appeared in the anthology’s first two printings, his “Brown Madonna” has not appeared in subsequent editions, including the only one currently in print.⁴ One consequence of this erasure has been to vitiate the volume’s originally insistent aura of messianic expectation, a messianism heralded by the “Brown Madonna” and her baby as well as by Reiss’s suggestively beatific portraits of prominent New Negro figures: Locke, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Elise McDougald, and others. These lush, full-color plates create a veritable renaissance iconography, one that establishes an almost sacred iconicity. Many of the subjects’ heads float disembodied, evoking spiritual transcendence; their foreheads gleam with accentuated effect, suggesting haloes. Jean Toomer glows with a radiance that exceeds even the brown Madonna’s, in keeping with the fact that he, more than any other contributor, is held to promise a fulfillment of the volume’s messianic hopes. (William Stanley Braithwaite’s New Negro essay even invokes Toomer as the “bright morning star of a new day of the race,” echoing Christ’s own self-identification as “the bright and morning star” in Revelation 22:16⁵).

Fig 1.

Winold Reiss, The Brown Madonna, 1925. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee.

Reproduced by permission of Renate Press.

Fig 2.

Richard Bruce Nugent, Mary Madonna, 1930.

Reproduced with permission from the collection of Thomas H. Wirth.

To encounter The New Negro as it was originally published, then, is a little like reading a lavishly illustrated Bible. It is also to wonder whether the anthology offers itself, rather more literally than is commonly acknowledged, as “the Bible of the Harlem Renaissance.”⁶ As we will see, Locke’s anthology not only participates in scriptural typology but actually presents itself as a typological fulfillment of scripture, compiling a highly selective canon of renaissance texts and in the process providing a kind of New Testament for African American culture. Accordingly, the volume’s messianic expectations simmer palpably beneath its surface, coming finally to a boil in the concluding essay by Du Bois: a document whose Revelatory character was, I argue, partly determined by Locke’s own editorial hand.

Returning to the blasphemous character of Bruce Nugent’s writings and art, I consider here how the works of Nugent and his friend Wallace Thurman—roommates in Harlem’s notorious “Niggeratti Manor”—engage and challenge both orthodox Christianity and the New Negro dogma espoused by Locke’s anthology. The pages that follow explore The New Negro’s auto-sacralizing bid to consolidate, through a forceful appropriation of biblical rhetoric and revelation, this renaissance orthodoxy that Thurman and Nugent will so delight in defiling. To attend to these dynamics is to recognize a hitherto obscured theological core of Harlem Renaissance politics and poetics—to see, in short, how The New Negro and its less pious literary successors produce a cultural dialogue out of the dueling rhetorics of consecration and desecration, of prophecy and profanation.

The New Negro as New Testament

Locke’s anthology fairly hums with biblical imagery, cadence, and trope, from Aaron Douglas’s illustrations to the scores and lyrics of “Negro spirituals” to the stories and poems of Rudolph Fisher, John Matheus, Eric Walrond, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen. (Years later, Wallace Thurman would caustically portray Cullen’s writing process thus: “Fingers on typewriter, mind frantically conjuring African scenes. And there would of course be a Bible nearby.”⁷) Locke himself establishes a biblical tone in his introduction, interpreting Harlem as “the home of the Negro’s ‘Zionism’” and then widening this observation’s scope and implications: “As with the Jew, persecution is making the Negro international.”⁸ Later, he writes of American slavery and the “sorrow songs” that “the only historical analogy is the spiritual experience of the Jews and the only analogue, the Psalms.”⁹

Locke’s assessments here contribute to African America’s deeply rooted typological identification with the Bible’s “chosen people.” Theophus Smith calls such imaginative figurations “Exodus strategies,” reminding us that throughout African American history “all corporate liberation efforts can be configured … as dramatic reenactments of Exodus, and their leaders envisioned as approximate types of Moses.”¹⁰ In The New Negro’s cultural moment, however—in the wake of a decade-long Exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North—an updated messianic presence was called for. The new New Negroes, especially those black writers and artists who had established themselves in “the promised land” of Harlem, were through with needing a Moses; they desired a Christ.¹¹ Such expectation suffuses Locke’s anthology, whose telling epigraph—“O, rise, shine for Thy Light is a’ coming”—dispels any doubts about the Christological import of “The Brown Madonna” on the previous leaf. It is in this context that Locke and other contributors establish, repeatedly, the New Negro’s role as redemptive prophet. “The black scholar, seer, sage, prophet sings his message,” declaims Albert Barnes in his prominently positioned essay.¹² According to Locke, the new black cultural figure must create “arresting visions and vibrant prophecies” in “rhapsodic Biblical speech,” affording African America “a new soul,” “a fresh spiritual and cultural focusing,” “a renewed race-spirit,” “a spiritual emancipation”: in short, “a spiritual quickening and racial leavening such as no generation has yet felt and known.”¹³

This lexicon of the sacred offers a useful, if not wholly satisfying, way to understand the contradictory obligations with which Locke’s anthology burdens the shoulders of the New Negro: to express his or her stake in the direction of the race through a paradoxically disinterested art, and to be best “representative” of that race by not striving to be representative. “The newer motive,” Locke writes, “in being racial is to be so purely for the sake of art”—to embrace a sacred calling in “the domain of pure and unbiassed art,” forsaking such profane pursuits as “the shambles of conventional polemics, cheap romance and journalism.”¹⁴ The way Locke reconciles that seeming disjunction between, on one hand, the New Negro’s social and political functions of advancing the race and, on the other, this figure’s necessary commitment to a “pure,” transcendent, disengaged art is to unite both commitments in a sacred cultural project. Given the sacral character of the New Negro’s sociopolitical struggle, his or her art must likewise aspire to the condition of the sacred—must transcend, that is, precisely those worldly matters it is tasked with complementing.

Hence The New Negro’s near-biblical exhortations, the most insistent of which Locke reserves for last in a further echo of the New Testament. For Du Bois’s contribution, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” is the anthology’s Revelation, its most overtly and hauntingly apocalyptic text.¹⁵ Signaling this concluding essay’s prophetic character is its portentous, vatic register: “With nearly every great European empire to-day walks its dark colonial shadow, while over all Europe there stretches the yellow shadow of Asia that lies across the world.”¹⁶ Further, in asserting that “the day faintly dawns when the new force for international understanding and racial readjustment will and must be felt,” Du Bois invokes the paradoxical temporality of revelation, the blend of imminence (“the day dawns”) and elusiveness (“faintly dawns”) that characterizes all apocalyptic texts (413). Du Bois begins by recalling his famous pronouncement in The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”—and by asking rhetorically whether this constitutes “prophecy or speculation” (385). His own answer, evidently, is “prophecy,” for in the essay’s closing words he will reiterate with confidence his vision of “the problem of the 20^th century as the Problem of the Color Line” (414).¹⁷ The future’s hope, Du Bois proclaims, rests with a racial Redeemer: “the black apostle,” who will “devote himself to race uplift not by the compulsion of outer hate but by the lure of inner vision” (397).

Du Bois, of course, has inner visions of his own to share. One of these emerges in his opening paragraph, immediately establishing the essay’s apocalyptic tenor: the “great event of these great years, the World War” (385). That event, in words that ring tragically prophetic from this side of World War II, has left behind a “fatal seed” destined to pullulate into further “world dissension and catastrophe” (385). The war returns when Du Bois subsequently arraigns France for using black men as “‘shock’ troops” in a large-scale “blood sacrifice” (392–93). It returns most forcefully, however, in the unsettlingly eschatological vision of Du Bois’s conclusion, which invokes a great cleansing holocaust and the heavenly city that lies just beyond it: “There came during the Great War … a vision of the Glory of Sacrifice, a dream of a world greater, sweeter, more beautiful and more honest than ever before; a world without war, without poverty and without hate. I am glad it came. Even though it was a mirage it was eternally true” (413).

Prompted by the apocalyptic violence of a world war, this vision of a New Jerusalem succeeding yet another annihilation is as fleeting, historically (merely “a mirage”), as it is “eternally true.” Our prophet nonetheless senses the vision’s return: “To-day some faint shadow of it comes to me again” (413). Du Bois locates his prophesied Holy City in Liberia, the nation founded by freed American slaves: a land of “Silver and Gold and Ivory,” “a little thing set upon a Hill” that recalls both Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and John Winthrop’s famous self-sanctifying trope (414; cf. Matt. 5:14).¹⁸ Though small, Du Bois writes, Liberia has labored valiantly “to resist the power of modern capital,” the economic and political complex that “owns and rules England, France, Germany, America and Heaven. And can Liberia escape the power that rules the world? I do not know; but I do know unless the world escapes, the world as well as Liberia will die; and if Liberia lives it will be because the World is reborn as in that vision splendid of 1918” (414). That it requires the violence of a horrific war to elicit this “splendid” vision of the world’s rebirth—a vision predicated on another violent “cleansing” in baptismal blood—is as chilling as it is true to the rhetorical tradition of apocalyptic eschatology.

It is worth comparing this essay with its initial version, an article entitled “Worlds of Color” that had appeared in the April 1925 issue of Foreign Affairs. Consider, first, the opening paragraph of each version, where Du Bois addresses the “catastrophe” of World War I:

How deep were the roots of this catastrophe entwined about the color line? And of the legacy left, what of the darker race problems will the world inherit?¹⁹

Fruit of the bitter rivalries of economic imperialism, the roots of that catastrophe were in Africa, deeply entwined at bottom with the problems of the color line. And of the legacy left, the problems the world inherits hold the same fatal seed; world dissension and catastrophe still lurk in the unsolved problems of race relations.

(The New Negro, 385)

The metaphor of roots remains in the New Negro essay, but the mode of address has changed from query to assertion, and from uncertainty to the total certainty we expect of our prophets. The register has also changed considerably, with the addition of some nice apocalyptic touches (“that same fatal seed”; “world dissension and catastrophe still lurk”). Further on, we find a similarly apocalyptic sentence with no precedent in the earlier version: “What prophet can tell what world-tempest lurks in these cloud-like shadows?” (389). Liberia, earlier “set upon a hill” (444), is in The New Negro “set upon a Hill,” emphasizing the biblical allusion and its grandiloquence (414). And whereas, in the earlier article, Du Bois warns that “world democracy as well as Liberia” may “die” (444), in the New Negro version it is “the world” itself that may die (414)—a more patently apocalyptic scenario.

Still more significant is that a lengthy portion of the New Negro essay does not appear in the earlier publication, a fact that has gone unremarked by scholars of Locke as well as of Du Bois (409–13). Locke himself apparently chose to include this section from among the drafts and fragments Du Bois had produced in preparation for the Foreign Affairs piece.²⁰ Later, Locke would even characterize his midwifery as an actual “rewriting”: “I rewrote [Du Bois’s contribution] for him from two old articles of his that he contemptuously tossed over his desk top to me…. He refused to write anything fresh.”²¹ Certainly Locke revised “Worlds of Color” throughout, and given that Du Bois’s participation in the anthology was “somewhat clenched”—the two men were not on good terms in 1925—Locke’s recollection of Du Bois’s near-total indifference deserves our attention if not our outright credulity.²² In any case, it is striking to reflect that much of this essay’s most plainly apocalyptic language appears in the several pages that do not appear in Du Bois’s Foreign Affairs article.²³ Together with the others, these additions demonstrate Locke’s concerted effort to ratchet up the apocalypticism of Du Bois’s article for its inclusion as The New Negro’s Revelation. As elsewhere in his stewardship of the anthology, Locke here took a heavy hand.²⁴ And no less than the suggestive placement of “The Brown Madonna” cradling the New Negro at the book’s beginning, the apocalypticism at its end ensured that the entire volume would cohere in the desired New-Testament fashion.

That The New Negro’s biblicization was intentional is further suggested by the ways it differs from its predecessor, the “Harlem number” of Survey Graphic that Locke also edited.²⁵ On one level, The New Negro departs from the Survey issue by downplaying any notion of Harlem as a materially and historically locatable space and time.²⁶ The “real” Harlem recedes in Locke’s anthology, while a different Harlem emerges: a mythopoetic time-space, or, in Joseph Allen Boone’s phrase, “a spatially realized spiritual goal” better suited to The New Negro’s sacred undertaking—as well as to its efforts to produce what is an essentially messianic temporality.²⁷ For according to a somewhat convoluted logic, the New Negro’s presence is felt throughout the anthology as both incipient and awaited, already in evidence but as yet unrealized: a Word not quite made flesh, even if its incarnation can be glimpsed in the arms of “The Brown Madonna” and in the promise of a Jean Toomer or a Langston Hughes.

This temporally ambivalent logic actually abets The New Negro’s messianism, since the literature of revelation always relies on a conjoining of imminence and deferral. Further, in proclaiming its subject as both brand-new and not quite, The New Negro aligns itself with what Joseph J. Murphy calls the historical “double meaning of African American theology,” according to which the “freedom promised in the scriptures … is ‘already but not yet.’”²⁸ Therein lies the rhetorical strength, as well as the frustrating limitation, of The New Negro’s thesis. The problem with its Good News is that it is still only prophetic; practically speaking, Locke’s volume continues to await the Chosen One, the real flesh-and-blood New Negro. The referent of the anthology’s title remains protean and elusive, a lacuna at the core of its own biography, which itself remains a proleptic, provisional invocation of the New Negro’s nativity.²⁹ The New Negro is a New Testament without (yet) a Christ, although it rhetorically makes its messiah’s presence felt throughout. That presence is suggested so frequently—in the image of a brown Madonna’s child, in the reiterated promise of certain young writers and talents, in the biblical parallels that its stories and poems rehearse—that many readers must have been sorely tempted, in 1925, to accept its glad tidings as an article of faith. Which, perhaps, is all they ever were.

Apostasy of the Niggeratti

With his 1932 roman à clef Infants of the Spring, Wallace Thurman produced one of the most memorable satires of the Harlem Renaissance, of the politics behind The New Negro, and of a rebellious group of young Harlem writers and artists—the self-described “Niggeratti”—that included Richard Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thurman himself. One passage in particular, a blasphemous prayer meeting held at “Niggeratti Manor,” showcases the novel’s determined irreverence both toward organized religion and toward the New Negro ethos promulgated by Locke’s programmatic anthology:

Beloved, we join hands here to pray for gin…. Surely, God who let manna fall from the heavens so that the holy children of Israel might eat, will not let the equally holy children of Niggeratti Manor die from the want of a little gin. Children, let us pray….

Father in heaven, we bend before thee. Hear, oh hear, our plea. Send us some gin, Lord, send us some gin….

And, Lord, send me a little sandwich too.

(102)

This passage evokes a Harlem altogether different than The New Negro’s sanitized and mythopoeticized “promised land.” For one thing, Thurman anchors us in a specific, geographically locatable site—267 West 136^th Street—a site, moreover, that provoked considerable consternation in older renaissance figures such as Locke and Du Bois. This is not the Harlem The New Negro wanted us to see; as J. Martin Favor has put it, “Thurman turns Harlem from an imagined site of redemption into a kind of sideshow.”³⁰

Bruce Nugent’s own novel Gentleman Jigger—written contemporaneously, for the most part, with Thurman’s Infants, though not published until 2008—presents a very similar picture of the irreverent goings-on at Niggeratti Manor: “Everyone brags about their sins here. And then absolves themselves in gin.”³¹ Not surprisingly, Locke’s fictional counterparts in Infants and Jigger worry incessantly over this “decadent strain,” the tendency of the Niggeratti to “wallow in the mire of post-Victorian license” (Infants, 234).³² Yet as Thurman memorably depicts it, “the first and last salon” that Locke organizes for the younger artists descends almost immediately into a babel of infighting and “blasphem[ies]” (234–35). “Pandemonium reigned,” Thurman writes, and the Miltonic echo is telling, for as Thurman recreates Babel he also restages another biblical narrative: the fall of the rebel angels (242). It is an apt metaphor for the renegade Niggeratti’s renunciations of Locke’s New Negro vision.

In Gentleman Jigger and Infants of the Spring, Nugent and Thurman exploit and send up that vision. Both novels feature black Christ figures prominently and unsubtly, and in a way that contrasts so stridently with Locke’s project as to profane the entire New Negro enterprise. The character Paul Arbian—a fictional version of Nugent—gets to play the Christ role in Thurman’s Infants, “aglow” as he is “with some inner incandescence” (44). In his letters, Paul announces himself as the messiah whose coming is foretold and inevitable: “Ignoring me will not appreciably delay my coming. It is written” (224). And in his extravagant self-sacrifice at novel’s end, Arbian fulfills his role as the novel’s half-baked Christ. Having covered the bathroom floor with his novel manuscript, he slashes his wrists with “a highly ornamented Chinese dirk,” dying a martyr to decadent art; his friends will later discover the “colorful, inanimate corpse in a crimson streaked tub” (283).

In Gentleman Jigger, Nugent similarly casts himself as an aestheticized Christ. The “saintly-looking” Stuartt (Nugent’s name in the novel) smiles “beatifically,” exuding a “walking-on-the-waters attitude” (57, 138, 107). He likes on occasion to call himself God and to intone the words of the New Testament, sometimes verbatim—“by their works shall ye know them”—and other times in paraphrase: “But the blackest of these was Rusty” (66–67). The novel’s more pertinent Christ figure, however, is Stuartt’s brother and alter ego: Aeon, “the greatest of living American poets,” a character clearly modeled after the real-life Jean Toomer (63). As in Winold Reiss’s New Negro portrait of Toomer, “a halo was cast about his head”; in short, “the man did look like Jesus” (62). This figuration becomes increasingly satirical and surprisingly explicit, as Aeon finally “confesses” to his lover that he is in fact the Christ: “You see, Myra, as Jesus, it was the desire of God, my Father, that I, by my deaths, expiate the sins of the world” (151). One of these deaths occurs at the end of part 1 of Gentleman Jigger, as Aeon expires in a “terrible traffic accident”—but it remains unclear what sort of redemption, if any, he achieves (161). Whereas Locke’s anthology casts Toomer as the most likely candidate for the messianic New Negro, Nugent makes Toomer a figure of the doomed, failed messiah—one more likely to be crushed by an oncoming car than to redeem his race through literature.

Likewise, while Thurman’s novel cites Toomer as the only African American artist with “the elements of greatness,” it also portrays him as one of the many “Negroes of talent [who] were wont to make one splurge, then sink into oblivion” (221, 62). Thurman’s and Nugent’s separate invocations of Toomer as the model, yet failed, Negro redeemer are particularly telling, because by the time Infants of the Spring was published, Toomer had not only apparently failed to make good on the promise he’d exhibited in Cane nearly a decade earlier; he had also repudiated any racial affiliation with “Negroes,” let alone New Negroes. If he was to be a messiah, he wanted to herald the dawn not of a new day in the black race but of the new “American” race at whose coming he had already hinted in Cane. In their satirical treatments of Toomer, Infants and Jigger both participate in the tradition established by The New Negro of heralding Cane’s author as the One—but given all that had changed since 1925, their appropriations of Toomer take on a decidedly cynical flavor. By the early 1930s, these novels suggest, the elusive New Negro had come to seem less “morning star” than dying star—and one that refused to be tethered to any racial program, let alone a sacred African American calling.³³ To adapt Houston Baker’s influential terms, if The New Negro “mastered the form” of scriptural typology—exploiting biblical precedent in a calculated bid for cultural recognition—these novels work to “deform” that very mastery, denigrating and defiling the notion of an African American messiah.³⁴ What Locke tacitly exploits, Thurman and Nugent openly profane; where The New Negro plays black Christ, they play blaspheming trickster, “signifying” on the anthology’s messianic program.

Locke’s strategy may have been the stronger. The success of his endeavor at canon formation—and of that canon’s ability to quash heretical counterdiscourses—can be measured by the relative popularity and availability in the decades since of The New Negro and of the Niggeratti’s most notorious platform, the short-lived but incendiary magazine Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists.³⁵ Fire!!’s one and only issue was helmed by Thurman and published in 1926 with the intention, said Nugent, to “shock the hell out of them.”³⁶ As Suzanne Churchill has observed, the “legend” of this periodical’s radical assault on old-guard sensibilities obscures affinities between Fire!! and even such comparatively staid publications as Du Bois’s Crisis.³⁷ Yet Fire!! was nonetheless plainly oppositional, both in intent and in its immediate reception. Locke, for one, proclaimed the magazine “a manoeuver of artistic secession,” while in the pages of Opportunity Cullen obliged Thurman’s desires by recognizing “a wish to shock in this first issue,” predicting “that the wish will be well realized among the readers of Fire.”³⁸

This shock value has much to do with the magazine’s brazen use of biblical and other Christian materials, a strategy that conspicuously recalls while also departing from Locke’s New Negro strategies. Fire!! opens with a foreword that moves swiftly from demonic imagery to a “pagan” invocation of flesh and soul—and finally to a quotation from a Langston Hughes poem that mines the language and cadences of spirituals and of the black church:

FIRE … melting steel and iron bars, poking livid tongues between stone apertures and burning wooden opposition with a cackling chuckle of contempt.

FIRE … weaving vivid, hot designs upon an ebon bordered loom and satisfying pagan thirst for beauty unadorned … the flesh is sweet and real … the soul an inward flush of fire…. Beauty? … flesh on fire—on fire in the furnace of life blazing….

“Fy-ah,Fy-ah, Lawd,Fy-ah gonna burn ma soul!”³⁹

Hughes’s lyric transvalues the preacher’s traditional invocation of hellfire, which here metaphorizes a proudly heretical form of unabashed expression that rages against the “wooden opposition” of bourgeois cultures both black and white. Its “livid tongues” of flame connote a nexus of flesh and spirit that aptly conveys fire’s figuration as the element shared by the soul (fire’s “inward flush”) and the flesh (“on fire in the furnace of life blazing”). Surely, too, the writer of these lines had in mind Acts 2:3, in which the Holy Spirit descends on Christ’s apostles in “tongues like as of fire.” Far from the idealized, fleshless messiah invoked by The New Negro—with its emphasis on the soul, minus the body, of African America’s new cultural dawn—the desire expressed in Fire!!’s foreword is to forge in some fiery smithy an uncreated amalgam of flesh, soul, spirit, and word.

Immediately following Hughes’s hymn to “Fy-ah!” is Thurman’s short story “Cordelia the Crude.” The very title signals that such a story could not have found a home in The New Negro; it is indeed, as Thurman and Nugent intended it, something of “a shocker” (Gentleman Jigger, 31). “Physically, if not mentally,” Thurman begins—already a suggestive opener—“Cordelia was a potential prostitute.”⁴⁰ By story’s end, that potential will become fully realized. The sixteen-year-old Cordelia’s “wanton promiscuity,” like Fire!! itself, burns with “the rebellious flame”—yet she discriminates enough, at least, to steer clear of “the bloated, lewd faced Jews” (5–6). So much for “Exodus strategies.” Far from identifying with the Jew as a figure of mutual oppression, Cordelia, like the story that contains her, views the figure’s otherness as absolute and unassimilable. “Cordelia the Crude” has no truck with The New Negro’s typological investments—either its invocations of Hebraic parallels or its more emphatic rewriting of those parallels to promote its Christ-like, messianic New Negro.

There is something else worth noting, though, about The New Negro’s anticipated black Christ and about Fire!!’s revisions of that figure. For while the tragic trope of the suffering black body as a crucified Christ has its own rich tradition in African American literature, Locke’s anthology offers something very different: a sanitized, even bowdlerized Christological typology that quietly ignores this grim figuration.⁴¹ The Lockean “New Negro” is essentially the black-Christ trope shorn of its negative valance, a fact nowhere more evident than in Locke’s systematic pruning of lynching references from the anthology. Neither the word “lynching” nor any of its cognates appears in the volume’s 450 pages: this at a time when lynching remained a persistent element of the United States’ racial landscape and when some of The New Negro’s most celebrated contributors had already produced powerful literary documents of these atrocities.⁴² Such portrayals were not what Locke needed for his anthology, which instead proffered the optimistic flipside to the Crucifixion trope—a trope that the self-styled Niggeratti would resurrect with insistent force in the years immediately following The New Negro’s publication.

Among Fire!!’s suite of ten poems, for example, Helene Johnson’s “A Southern Road” depicts a lynched black body as the “sacrificial” offering at an altar to the “raff” of white supremacy.⁴³ Three of the other nine poems contain suggestive allusions to trees and to their occasionally strange fruit; Cullen’s reference, for instance, to the “bursting fruit” that white Americans “reap” inevitably calls forth the similar imagery he invokes in The Black Christ (1929).⁴⁴ In an illustration for the January 1928 issue of Opportunity, Bruce Nugent would depict this connection in stark black and white, portraying a lynched body dangling below intersecting tree limbs that form an oblique yet unmistakable cross (fig. 3).⁴⁵ But no one more eagerly and provocatively reclaimed the black Christ as an overtly politicized figure than Fire!! contributor and Niggeratti member Langston Hughes, author of such controversial poems as “Goodbye Christ” (1932) and “Christ in Alabama” (1931). Hughes thus makes for an apt figure to prepare Fire!!’s readers—via his prominently foregrounded poem “Fire”—for the varieties of New Negro sacrilege to follow. Like Thurman’s and Nugent’s romans à clef, Hughes’s poem echoes the sacramental idiom of Locke’s anthology. It sets a precedent, moreover, for the self-conscious emulation and revision of that idiom that Fire!! itself employs.

Fig 3.

Richard Bruce Nugent, illustration for “Black Gum” by William V. Kelley. Opportunity 6, no. 1 (January 1928), 13.

The magazine’s concluding article is a striking case in point. Recalling with eerie precision the rhetorical strategies of The New Negro’s own concluding essay, Thurman’s coda to the issue begins by invoking a “prophecy” he made “some time ago” and by offering that prediction’s prophetic status as indeterminate: “So far my prophecy has failed to pan out, and superficially it seems as if it never will.”⁴⁶ Thurman’s prophecy—his very use of that term suggesting yet another ironic undercutting of his renaissance elders—has less to do with the future of race relations broadly considered, as in Du Bois, than with a foreseen vindication of Carl Van Vechten’s 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. Like Du Bois, however, Thurman returns to the questionable status of his earlier prophecy only to offer it again with even greater confidence in his prognosticating prowess: “Thus I defiantly reiterate that a few years hence Mr. Van Vechten will be spoken of as a kindly gent rather than as a moral leper.”⁴⁷ That Fire!! ends by rushing to the defense of a prominent renaissance patron newly vilified for his sensationalist depictions of black Harlem—as well as for manifesting that “decadent strain” that so worried Locke (Infants, 234)—testifies to the magazine’s efforts “to shock the members of the older generation.”⁴⁸

It is further significant that Nigger Heaven, this novel that Thurman has chosen to defend as the final word in Fire!!, climaxes with an explicitly sacrilegious rite, what one character describes as “duh Black Mass.”⁴⁹ This “witches’ sabbath” precipitates the novel’s violent conclusion, in which one black man fires two bullets into the body of another.⁵⁰ The author’s choice of words is suggestive: “He drew his revolver and shot once, twice into the ugly black mass.”⁵¹ Thus does Van Vechten link a blasphemous ceremony—the Black Mass—to the corporeality of this African American corpse, as well as to that other black mass, the African American population at large. Blasphemy here emerges as nothing less than the discursive mode in which the novel articulates Harlem life and black identity—and blasphemy likewise serves the Niggeratti, led by one of Van Vechten’s more vocal defenders, as the preferred mode in which to articulate their irreverent perspectives on that life and that identity.

On the Sanctity of Mergers

Fire!!’s most transgressive work is also its most well-known: Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” a polymorphously avant-garde short story that queers race, gender, and sexuality while making a mockery of the Protestant work ethic. It also, in the words of Marlon Ross, outdoes Nigger Heaven’s “blasphemous gesture” by “intertwin[ing] the singing of a spiritual with homosexual imagery.”⁵² The passage Ross has in mind samples the very Hughes poem quoted in the magazine’s foreword: “Beauty’s lips had pressed hard … cool … cool … fy-ah Lawd […] Beauty’s body had pressed close … close … fy-ah’s gonna burn my soul […] Beauty’s lips pressed hard against his teeth … Alex trembled … could feel Beauty’s body … close against his … hot … tense … white … and soft … soft … soft … … …”⁵³ Nugent’s interweaving of Hughes’s sermon-cum-spiritual “Fire” with an unprecedented evocation of interracial same-sexuality makes this one of the most iconoclastic moments in African American modernism.⁵⁴ Of course, such iconoclasm recurs throughout Nugent’s body of work, from his erotically transgressive visual art to the Wildean “Bible stories” he wrote in the late 1920s and early ’30s—stories in which Jesus lives and, presumably, sleeps with his disciples.⁵⁵ Like Nugent’s contribution to Fire!!, these stories assault taboos while breaking, in particular, many of the unspoken editorial rules of The New Negro: that one must elide those “decadent” displays of eroticism that characterized “the naughty nineties”—Locke’s words—and at least tacitly valorize the necessity for hard artistic work on behalf of “the Negro.”⁵⁶ But dandyism requires a steadfast commitment to leisure, decadence, artifice, queerness—and Nugent played the role of the black dandy to the hilt.⁵⁷

As does his fictional counterpart in Infants of the Spring, who at one point regales an assembled crowd with the tale of a recent dream (“I was in Eden …” [45]). Whereas in “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” Nugent’s narrator allegorizes an attractive lover as “Beauty,” in this prelapsarian erotic fantasy the reverse occurs: Beauty itself is personified as an erotic partner of indeterminate sex. “Beauty dimmed my eyes…. My hand reached out and clutched a silken forelock. Involuntarily my eyes closed and I was conscious of being sucked into it until there was a complete merging. For one brief moment I experienced supreme ecstasy” (45). The ecstatic experience of this “complete merging” signals a suspension of all distinctions and boundaries, an encounter with the divine or sacred—with “an immanent immensity, where there are neither separations nor limits,” as Georges Bataille defines the sacred in his Theory of Religion.⁵⁸ The paradisiac, indeed explicitly biblical trappings of the Nugent character’s reverie underscore the mystical sense of ecstasy as rapture, as spiritual transport to the sort of divine immanence Bataille describes. No separation, no limits: such a vision of the sacred accords aptly with the Niggeratti’s rebel spirit.

The intricate interplay of “flesh” and “soul” in Fire!!’s foreword announces just such a denial of separations, as the sacred and the profane merge indissolubly “in the furnace of life blazing.” Analogous mergings likewise recur in Thurman’s fiction, and always in distinctly profane contexts that nonetheless give rise to a miraculous sense of plenitude, of oneness—of immanence, divine or otherwise. Witness the climactic rent party of Infants of the Spring, where “shouts of joy merged into one persistent noisy blare” (184, emphasis added)—or another rent party, this one at “a well known whore house” in Fire!!’s “Cordelia the Crude,” where there arises “a chaotic riot of raucous noise and clashing color all rhythmically merging” (6, emphasis added). Here, as in Infants, the colors merge, with all racial (and sexual) distinctions becoming “completely eradicated. Whites and blacks clung passionately together as if trying to effect a permanent merger. Liquor, jazz music, and close physical contact had achieved what decades of propaganda had advocated with little success” (186). That this raucous party’s “merger” miraculously outpaces the efforts of mundane propaganda highlights Niggeratti Manor’s ritual and symbolic function as a space where boundaries and limits become porous, where sacred and profane, angelic and forbidden, are allowed to interpenetrate and meld.

It is, in the contexts of Christian mores and New Negro orthodoxy, a profanatory space that nonetheless functions as an appropriate setting for what Bernard Bell has called the “Afro-American canonical story”: “the quest, frequently with apocalyptic undertones, for freedom, literacy, and wholeness.”⁵⁹ The Niggeratti share, that is, the desire for the sacred that we see in The New Negro; their texts nonetheless betray far less reverent notions about how to get there. And although Locke’s strategies have in some ways overshadowed and marginalized those of the Niggeratti, what is finally most impressive about the latter is precisely what they managed to articulate from the margins—from the heretical, blasphemous peripheries of orthodox discourses of racial uplift and aesthetic “purity.” If the traditional scholarly equation of modernism and secularism has kept us from fully registering the rhetorical thrust of Locke’s project, writers such as Nugent and Thurman saw it clearly and responded in kind—contesting not only the prevailing pieties of their time but also the received wisdom of our own.