Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, A Biography of the Harlem Renaissance

Epilogue

Epilogue After publishing The Living Is Easy to wide acclaim in 1948, Dorothy West lived, in her words, a “retiring” life on Martha’s Vineyard. Of the three cousins, only Helene Johnson remained in New York, where she raised her daughter and worked with Marian Minus, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Dorothy Steele at Consumers Union. Eugenia Rickson and her husband, military veteran Marion Ray Jordan, moved to Onset, Massachusetts, a resort town next to Cape Cod. Though the cousins were no longer in the public eye, writing remained of utmost importance and an essential aspect of their identity. Helene Johnson’s daughter,Abigail McGrath, recalls that her mother ceased writing poetry professionally, but “she continued to live life with the soul of a poet until she died. Moreover, she wrote a little something every day of her life, even if it was an ad for a car (‘Cadillac is Badillac’) or a review of a film.”1 West also continued to write, despite the demands of her widowed mother and the obligation to care for a number of elderly relatives. After the deaths of her mother in 1954 and her Aunt Carrie in 1958, Dorothy lived alone in the Vineyard house. For over twenty years she wrote columns,“The Highlands Water Boy” and “The Cottagers’ Corner,” for the Vineyard Gazette, reporting on the African American community of Oak Bluffs and recording her bird watching and the subtle interplay of people and nature on the island. She also worked on TheWedding, a novel about the elite African American summer colony on Martha’s Vineyard. Feeling out of tune with the times, she decided against publishing the book for fear it would be deprecated by the 1960s militants, who had no interest in the black aristocracy. It was also during this time that West renewed her friendship with Elizabeth Pope White, a childhood friend from the Vineyard. Much like DorothyWest and Helene Johnson, Liz, asWest called her, had moved to NewYork in the 1930s, where she worked for the Federal Theatre Project and became immersed in literary and artistic Harlem. 157 Liz was, according to West, a talented actress, a dancer, a costume designer, and an avid Shakespearean. In 1960, after returning to theVineyard , she decided to produce a film of Othello with an all-black cast and an Afro-Caribbean jazz score, a project that consumed her energy and resources for the next twenty years.West joined the project as location manager, although she modestly described her job as “gofer,” saying,“We were both healthy as horses with unlimited energy—it was fun for me— my station wagon standing ready to be packed with props, coolers, and whatever paraphernalia Liz was seeking.” The film premiered in 1980, starring Yaphet Kotto as Othello, and won several awards.2 Meanwhile The Living Is Easy, like all of the novels by Harlem Renaissance women writers, had gone out of print. In 1982 the Feminist Press, spurred by Adelaide Cromwell, who provided an afterword, reissued the novel. Cromwell was a professor at Boston University and had met West thirty-five years earlier “picking blueberries on Martha’s Vineyard.”Their friendship grew, and in the early 1970s she invited West to address her African American Studies class.The effect was, she reports, “electrifying.” Both West and the students relished her memories of the Harlem Renaissance, and the lectures became “an awakening for her, a prologue to her rediscovery.”3 The publication of TheWedding, at Jacqueline Onassis’s urging, and The Richer, the Poorer in 1995, brought additional fanfare.West continued to receive invitations to speak at colleges and universities, and she was interviewed by publications across the country.Well into her eighties, she found herself feted by celebrities and pursued by admirers. The awards and acclaim showered on her in her final years capped an exhilarating journey and proved a fitting tribute. In the end, only West remained of all the literary sisters who had traveled with her on the road to artistic expression and to a life free of racial and gender proscriptions. L i t e ra ry S i s t e r s 158 ...