Dorothy West's Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color

Introduction

It seems counterintuitive if not downright disingenuous to begin by explaining that this is not a traditional biography. Rather, it is a book about what the genre of literary biography and life writing can teach us about our society and our interior lives. How does the consideration of one particular person’s life and art magnify our own? As a scholar of literature, I find writers’ imaginations and the tools they use to craft the worlds that animate their writing fascinating. I must confess, however, that I am singularly uninterested in the plodding narrative of a life from birth to the grave. Biographies that begin “it was a dark and stormy October night when so-and-so was born . . .” rarely find their way onto my bookshelves or into my syllabi. Am I now indulging in that tiresome biographers’ habit of musing on their chosen forms and insisting that their books will be different, only to more or less begin on the second page with “so-and-so was born . . .”? I don’t think so. If you pay close attention to the other words in the book’s title, then you will already have an inkling of what you are in for. In the mid-1990s, the paradise alluded to in the title might have been placed in scare quotes to emphasize its relative interpretations and my skepticism toward establishing any authoritative definition. In any case, it is your first clue. This book is about a place both elusive and material. For the poetically inclined, paradise evokes John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost; philosophers may turn to Thomas More’s Utopia. The location of Paradise can be a theological conundrum or a firmly held religious belief. For leisure-minded consumers it is a term replete with the promise of colonial ventures and hedonistic vacations. It might simply be an Edenic retreat from the noise and overcrowding of urban industry and the monotony of suburban sprawl. The subtitle qualifies the inexhaustible interpretations of paradise by promising a biography of class and color. It would be less elegant, but more accurate, to say that I consider West’s life and writing through the prisms of 1 Introduction Why would anybody write a book about me? —Dorothy West (Genii Guinier, “Interview with Dorothy West”) DOROTHY WEST’S PARADISE 2 2 class and color. I chose the word color over race to heighten attention to how racial identity works within African American culture. I acknowledge, however, that racial categorization and its Pandora’s box of legal, social, economic, and existential issues are certainly implicit in, if not explicitly evoked by, the word color. This book, then, magnifies how Dorothy West’s personal obsessions with the dynamics of class and color manifest in her writing. It is important to note that West is not alone; she shares her obsessions with others in the many social and artistic spheres she inhabited over the course of her life and career. I am interested in her preoccupations because they are the key to understanding how a group of people persevered against a system of oppression so pernicious that it remains a foundational site of identity formation in the United States of America. Studying Dorothy West helps me to answer a slew of provocative questions: How did a small number of African Americans find a measure of success, equality, and psychological freedom in the town of Oak Bluffs on the island of Martha’s Vineyard? How is that space representative of the anxieties and advantages of upper middle-class and elite black Americans? What is the cost of their success? And who bears the cost? Dorothy West’s passionately rendered stories, entertaining novels, and occasionally perplexing nonfiction provide a complex schematic of the strategies diverse groups of African Americans use to pursue happiness as well as the rewards and ramifications associated with such maneuvers. Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color examines the Harlem Renaissance writer’s public and private life to reveal what her multigenre mythmaking can tell us about class, gender, and regional fault lines within African American culture throughout the twentieth century. To accomplish this task, I cast a novelist as a social historian and an island as a site of nationalist desire; thus, by illuminating a writing life I am able to probe the social and cultural geography of class representation. The inspiration for this biography began in the right place with the wrong author. Dorothy West had...