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

4. Boston Girlhoods, 1910–1925

Chapter 4 Boston Girlhoods, 1910–1925 When Abigail McGrath, the daughter of Helene Johnson, first read Little Women, she imagined Alcott’s characters with the faces of Helene, Dorothy, and Eugenia. A fourth child in the family rounded out the similarity to Alcott’s characters: Melvin Jackson, a younger cousin, was raised with the three girls; he is the “little blond boy” often mentioned by Dorothy in interviews, and the child on whom she based Tim in The Living Is Easy. McGrath’s association of Alcott’s novel with the Bensons is understandable, given the similarities between the two matriarchal Boston families. Not only does Alcott’s book validate artistic careers for women but, beneath its veneer of Victorian propriety, it offers an alternative to the heteronormative family. Like the March women, the matrilineal Bensons reached across generations to offer each other support and encouragement in an environment in which men were mostly absent or marginal.This foundation supported Helene and Dorothy as they built their literary careers. Like the powerful Aunt March in Little Women, Rachel dominated the household and decided everyone’s future. Although she was determined that the cousins rise socially in Boston’s African American aristocracy, the lessons in deportment, elocution, and music, upon which she insisted, were probably intended less to help the cousins marry into a “blue-veined” Boston family and more to prepare them, as talented African American women, to confront an indifferent and possibly hostile world. Thus, in addition to their parlor accomplishments, the girls were given every opportunity for artistic expression through exposure to Boston’s rich cultural environment. In this respect,West’s novel is corroborated by Helene’s account of her childhood: according to her daughter, the three girls “went to the theatre, joined writing clubs, and did all the cultural things that young ladies of privilege did.”1 68 It would be difficult to envision a better atmosphere than early twentieth-century Boston in which to raise independent, artistic young African American women. As journalist Henry Moon said in a 1948 review of The Living Is Easy in Crisis magazine, “Boston . . . is more a state of mind than a geographic location . . . [for] the striving Negro community.”2 Even given the depredations of the city’s subtle racism and economic discrimination, Boston’s illustrious African American past and abolitionist tradition offered particular encouragement to ambitious women of color. In the careers of Phillis Wheatley, Louisa May Alcott, Pauline Hopkins, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (who reportedly began Uncle Tom’s Cabin in William Garrison’s office in Scollay Square), Dorothy and Helene would have noted that in Boston women could command respect, if not always financial remuneration, for their writing. Reading novels such as Henry James’s The Bostonians and Hopkins’s Of One Blood, they would also have observed examples of committed relationships between women, or Boston marriages, that were not unlike some relationships in their own family circle. Not only would the cousins have recognized in the accomplishments of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and her daughter, Florida Ruffin Ridley, the ways in which women could create new paradigms of social justice, but in the encouragement of enlightened men of letters like Eugene Gordon and William Stanley Braithwaite, they would have found support for their literary aspirations. Boston’s affirmation of black artists is corroborated in accounts by other African American writers from the city such as Braithwaite , Gordon, Ruffin Ridley,Adelaide Cromwell, and Walter Stevens. Although West’s portrait of Boston is accurate in many ways, the autobiographical elements of her work must be approached with caution since she took artistic license when it suited her, particularly in respect to the family finances. Her fictional family borrows elements not only from the Bensons but also from other families she knew in Boston. According to McGrath, the Benson’s Brahmin lifestyle was not supported exclusively by Isaac West’s fruit business, as Dorothy claimed; instead, it was maintained by the pooled wages of the Benson sisters, all of whom worked in domestic service. In addition, boarders and relatives in transit contributed to the household budget, a detail revealed in short stories like “The Five Dollar Bill” and “The Roomer,” but not in the novel.The fact that money was never as plentiful as Dorothy implied is Boston Girlhoods, 1910–1925 69 evident in her accounts of the cash prizes she won for her short stories. At the...