Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars

2. Harlem Renaissance Masquerades

BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 14 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [14], (1) Lines: 0 to 28 ——— 0.71701pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [14], (1) 2. Harlem Renaissance Masquerades Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston One finds emancipation in strange places, and in strange forms. Countee Cullen,“The Dark Tower,” My Soul’s High Song A fter the initial appearance of the confidence man as a deaf mute on the Fidèle in Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the next person to beg for charity is Black Guinea, a “grotesque negro cripple.” His identity is immediately questioned and taken for a masquerade by the wooden-legged man: “He’s some white operator, betwisted and painted up for a decoy. He and his friends are all humbugs” (14). Black Guinea plays on the stereotype the passengers of the Fidèle or America have imposed on him: grinning, shuffling, and beating his tambourine, he exudes the jollity all expect of him. Carolyn L. Karcher takes the wooden-legged man’s accusations of Black Guinea seriously and suggests that he may indeed be neither black nor crippled: Black Guinea, who may after all be only a white masquerading as a black, incarnates the confidence man’s joke on America: that the phantasm of race, in whose name Americans had refused to extricate themselves from the slave system that was destroying them, may not exist except in the white mind. Even more subversively, Guinea’s masquerade indicates that there is no way of ascertaining whether he is black or white hence no way of being sure that the treatment American society has reserved for him as a black man may not have been “mistakenly” inflicted on a white. (206) Moreover, the character of Thomas Fry (Happy Tom) in one of the interpolated tales bears a resemblance to Black Guinea. In fact, both characters may be disguises of the confidence man: both are crippled and “good natured and laughing all the time” (95). Ambiguous and unstable identities and “abject” bodies (see Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror) are recurring themes in Melville’s novel. The crippled bodies of Black Guinea and Happy Tom, along with the first appearance of the confidence man as a deaf mute, signify the memory of a loss marked in the flesh. By keeping the confidence man’s identity ambiguous, Melville puts on a minstrel BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 15 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [15], (2) Lines: 28 to 34 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [15], (2) show of the whole nation. The costumes and masks of the confidence man hide his identity and racial and cultural difference in general under the guises of a trickster who dons stereotypical gestures and speaks in clichés. Writings against the tradition of minstrel shows, popular with white audiences at the turn of the twentieth century, and against widespread racial stereotyping and racial masquerade were central to the literary imagination of the Harlem Renaissance. In this chapter, I read Countee Cullen’s only novel, One Way To Heaven (1932), as a coherent though schizophrenic narrative about a lower-class one-armed con man. In my interpretation, the novel’s competing story lines function as counterdiscourses to the Harlem Renaissance’s bourgeois ideology of the “New Negro.” In the next section I suggest that Nella Larsen’s novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), are symptomatic of the estrangement some of the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance experienced at the time of conspicuous consumption before the crash of 1929. The collapse of the stock market was devastating for both blacks and whites. Some critics place the end of the Harlem Renaissance at the Depression and the petering out of white patronage; others connect it to the Scottsboro tragedy of 1931,which was a traumatic experience in the black community.1 I will conclude my discussion of the Harlem Renaissance with a reading of...