The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

3. “Over There”

3 “Over There” I found that many subjects were taboo from the white man’s point of view. Among the topics they did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amendments to the constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1938) Richard Wright’s famous list of taboos for interracial conversation in 1920s Tennessee exhibits much of his talent for grim humor on the subject of white Southern racial prejudice. It is also a revealing litany of the totems and shibboleths around which African American struggles for social, material, and cultural inclusion were enacted in the first half of the twentieth century. Each item on Wright’s list had historically been a site of contestation for the status of African American masculinity, a contest that white Southerners at the Memphis optics company where Wright was working avoided by their prohibitive silence. It is interesting that France is the only country that is taboo, an indication that its wartime reputation for not having the social and sexual racial segregation of the United States left a lasting legacy: in France, in the white South, and in African America. Wright’s inclusion of France among the unmentionable aspects of “living Jim Crow” is testament that service in France, and the challenges it presented to American racial codes, retained an emotive influence long after the immediate consequences of demobilization. Certainly, the Great War in France afforded African American men opportunities many had not experienced before. As Wright noted, participating in the “manly self-assertion” of martial heroism was crucial, but so was engagement with a range of global cultures far removed from the soldiers’ peacetime experiences. Such an engagement was often written about in fiction and memoirs dealing with African American participation in the Great The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro 48 War through the trope of the acquisition of the French language, a language that often came to represent democracy, liberty, and a cosmopolitan sophistication . Indeed, white writers committed to the racist paradigms of eugenics or minstrelsy attempted to mollify the type of white fears that Wright referred to by dramatizing episodes of inept or incompetent African American assimilations of French language and culture. In consequence, African American servicemen acquiring French culture and language became an area of racial and political conflict, both in terms of representation and in the realities of servicemen returning home. This was a conflict fueled by the widespread recognition among white and black Americans that traveling to France and acquiring French had helped to shape a radical politics of protest in African American culture in the 1920s. Such a conflict also exemplified that the mobility that African American members of the AEF engaged in was not exclusively spatial; in Homi Bhabha’s words, it was a chance to escape the historical-political system that proclaimed the “belatedness” of the black man’s entry into history (“‘Race,’ Time” 168). If language acquisition and its potential links to racial egalitarianism was one of the most interesting aspects of overseas service to African American writers and intellectuals, the aspect that most occupied many white American minds was interracial sex. The infamous “Secret information concerning black American troops” communiqué circulated by the French Military Mission to the AEF in August 1918 was mostly concerned with advising the French to keep black American soldiers away from Frenchwomen, largely because such contact incensed white American sensibilities. As Felipe Smith suggests, fears of pollution, contamination, and racial atavism were attendant on interracial sex at this period in American life to a degree that demonstrated the inextricable role of race in American sexuality. Many white Americans shared the fear of Mississippi senator James K. Vardaman that African American soldiers would return “French-woman-ruined” (Barbeau and Henri 175). Throughout the 1920s, white writers played out these fears in novels, stories, and plays, luridly indulging while simultaneously disavowing erotically transgressive relationships between black men and white women. Finally, African American writers also chose to write about combat. And when they did it was often the terrain of no-man...