The Great Migration and the Literary Imagination
2009; Wiley; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-5923.2008.01259.x
ISSN1540-5923
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoIn his short story“With Malice Toward None,” novelist Chester Himes explores the troubled mind of Chick, a black Works Progress Administration (WPA) employee who in the depths of the Great Depression toils in Cleveland's city hall copying old records.11 Chester Himes, “With Malice Toward None,” in The Collected Stories of Chester Himes (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1990). Page references cited in the text refer to this edition. An earlier version of this paper was presented at The Historical Society's 2008 conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, on 6 June 2008. This version benefitted from the supportive and critical comments of Eric Arnesen, Wallace Best, Kevin Borg, James T. Campbell, Melvyn Dubofsky, Mark Facknitz, David Gellman, Mark Whalan, Gay Zieger, Robert Zieger, the audience at The Historical Society conference session. My sincere thanks to all and the Journal's anonymous reviewer. As Chick readies himself for a night on the town with his wife to celebrate his birthday, financial worries, not the joy of the occasion, occupy his thoughts. The apartment's meager furnishings—a “greasy drab overstuffed chair,” a “reedy sounding radio,” and a lamp “that burnt out bulbs faster than he could buy them”—all bought in the afterglow of their recent marriage, now appear as “junk from a credit store” that constantly remind him of the six-dollar monthly payments he cannot afford (pp. 48, 49). Gazing at his wife as she struggles through “the cautious ceremony” of putting on her stockings without putting a run in them, he can only think that he has “been a fool to marry her” without the means to “even buy the stockings she needed” (p. 48). No longer noticing his wife's good looks, he has now “worked up an intense resentment toward” her and her need for “so Goddamn many things” (p. 51). Cleveland's night spots offer the young couple little relief from the pressures of living on the margin. Chick's wife reminds him that they have only three dollars to spend for the night, but as they leave, he quietly pockets an extra five dollars set aside for the rent that will come due the next day. As they distance themselves from their squalid apartment, Chick begins to “feel huge and superior” (p. 51). Giving the taxi driver a generous tip as they exit at the elegant Terrace Garden makes him feel flush, but only for a moment. The “furs and top hats” of the “expensively groomed couples” make him “feel shabby again” (p. 52). Abruptly, he rushes his wife to the Cameo Club—a place that “wasn't so high”—in time to catch the last floor show (p. 52). There, he spies Tom Aubrey, an old acquaintance whom Chick describes as a big shot politician earning a “colossal salary” on a city government appointment (p. 52). When Aubrey invites the couple to join his friends, Chick refuses to admit that he is on public work and feigns a prosperity that fools no one. Feeling “stiff and self-conscious” in Aubrey's presence, Chick makes one more vain attempt to conceal his hard luck by picking up the tab over Aubrey's objections (p. 53). Chick must use the five dollars reserved for rent to pay the bill, leaving the couple with just enough change to cover car fare home. The story concludes as the couple eats in “strained silence” the next morning (p. 54). Chick suggests that they take a short-term loan from an uncle to cover rent. His wife offers to scale back on the food budget. They will make it, she promises, but they will have to miss this month's furniture payment. Confronting the reality of perpetual sacrifice, Chick leaves for work filled with bitterness and remorse. Himes's story, written in 1937, captures the anxieties of thousands of African Americans of meager means who struggled to build their lives amid the elusive abundance of the American City in the era of the Great Migration. As more than two million southern blacks migrated to such northern cities as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York City between 1915 and 1945, several African-American novelists turned to migration and the migrant experience in the city as topics for their fiction. Although Himes does not identify any of the characters in his story as migrants, he sets his tale in Cleveland, a city that by the 1930s had so much become a black migrant community that black residents had nicknamed it “AlabamaNorth.” In the 1930s and 1940s, Himes and several other black writers of his generation pioneered a new literary style called social realism, which explored with documentary detail the everyday frustrations of migrants in their confrontation with the urban North. Rejecting portrayals of black migration north as an exodus to a promised land, they wrote stories that explored how poverty, unemployment, racial violence, legal injustice, political corruption, and world war restricted the ability of migrants to build new lives in the North. Seldom do their protagonists fare well. They squander their money in cabarets, gambling dens, and brothels, abandon and brutalize their loved ones, and commit heinous crimes, including armed robbery, rape, and murder.22 On Cleveland as “AlabamaNorth,” see Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For expert analysis by literary scholars of the Great Migration in black literature, see Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?” The African American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Lawrence Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). The themes that informed the social consciousness of the literary realists of the 1930s and 1940s do not figure prominently in histories of the Great Migration written since the mid-1980s. Although no more likely to endorse the myth of the promised land than the social realists, social historians of black migration, with their emphasis on the agency and resistance of ordinary people, focus their work on the efforts of black migrants to resist, challenge, survive, and even overcome and thrive despite the oppression, poverty, and racism that structured their environment. Their narratives seemingly leave little room for characters, such as Chick and his wife, who acted neither romantically nor heroically in their encounter with the urban North. This article explores the many dimensions of these disconnected narratives of the Great Migration. Engaging the works of the black novelists of the 1930s and 1940s challenges the propensity among historians to elevate and valorize agency, what historian Walter Johnson calls the “master trope of the New Social History.” Black migrants, such as Himes's fictional character Chick, exercised plenty of agency as they negotiated the new world of the industrial North, but migrant agency was often destructive as well as creative, led to despair as much as survival, and could reinforce rather than contest exploitation. To take seriously the insights of social realist writers does not mean that historians should jettison the New Social History's narrative of agency and resistance for the social realists’ narrative of frustration and fear. Historians must keep in mind the social and political context that shaped and distorted the social realists’ vision of the urban world that black migrants inhabited. Nevertheless, these fictional sources suggest the need for striking a balance between the two. Trying to reconcile the narratives of the social realists with those of recent social historians forces historians to explore how ordinary people sought the city's liberating possibilities at the same time they confronted and raged against its palpable exclusions. It is to see, as Walter Johnson suggests for a reoriented history of American slavery, the lives of black migrants “as powerfully conditioned by, though not reducible to” the structural conditions of their environment. To integrate the literary imagination of social realism into a renewed history of black migration is not to give up on social history's promise of a history rooted in the experiences of ordinary people, but rather is to imagine a history that is more deeply human and, ultimately, that inspires greater empathy than one dedicated simply to the recovery of agency or self-determination.33 Walter Johnson, “On Agency,”Journal of Social History 37:1 (2003): 113, 115–116. See also Peter Coclanis, “The Captivity of a Generation,” review of Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, by Ira Berlin, William and Mary Quarterly 61:3 (July 2004): 544–556. Black social realists shared lived experiences and political commitments that sensitized them to matters often lost or submerged in the work of social historians. Perhaps first and foremost, black social realists drew inspiration for their fiction from their own unhappy encounter with migration. Maryland-born Waters Turpin, for example, who migrated to Harlem in the early 1930s to attend college at Columbia University, struggled to survive the Depression, working in a delicatessen, playing the numbers, and completing a degree that promised little social and economic advancement. “My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me,” remembered Richard Wright of his arrival in the Windy City from the Deep South in 1927. He describes how his early years in the city “mocked all my fantasies” as he struggled from job to job, until the Depression forced him onto relief and into living in a cramped kitchenette apartment. The peripatetic Himes reaped few rewards from migration. After leaving the South for Cleveland with his family in the 1920s, Himes failed to finish college, spent seven years in prison, and “survived the humiliating last five years of the Depression in Cleveland” before moving to Los Angeles during World War II, where “under the mental corrosion of race prejudice” he “became bitter and saturated with hate.” As he explained, he forever wanted to go “somewhere black people weren't considered the shit of the earth. It took me forty years to discover that such a place did not exist.” Having witnessed firsthand the failure of the Great Migration to generate a social and political transformation for African Americans, writers such as Turpin, Wright, and Himes confronted in their fiction the alienation, entrapment, oppression, and exploitation they came to believe awaited black migrants in the North. As the literary scholar Stacy Morgan has argued, “this generation of creators felt themselves to be of as well as for the poor and working-class masses of African Americans, often construing themselves as cultural workers.”44 Hollis Burney James, “These Low Grounds of Sin and Sorrow: The Life and Works of Waters Edward Turpin,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1978), 12–13; Richard Wright, American Hunger (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 1; Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, vol. 1 (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1971), 76, 48; and Stacy Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 5. Because they identified with the black masses, black social realists rejected the art of the Harlem Renaissance as irrelevant to most African Americans. They dismissed the literature of the 1920s as decadent, middle-class entertainment that pandered to white tastes and expectations of an inherent exoticism and primitivism among American blacks. They detected a sentimental celebration of the rural southern past, which they saw as an inadequate response to the challenges of the Great Migration. Rather than sustain what they regarded as the Harlem Renaissance's apolitical embrace of art for art's sake, this new generation of writers, whose social outlook was sharpened by the trauma of the Great Depression and whose political sympathies lay with the Communist Party, favored a new artistic aesthetic dedicated to creating social and political change. The New Challenge, a short-lived leftist literary magazine edited by African-American fiction writer Dorothy West, captured the concerns of black intellectuals, artists, and cultural critics associated with the Communist Party's push for a Popular Front. These writers were in search of a new literary style that would marry black nationalism to the class politics of communism. Writing in the New Challenge in the fall of 1937, Richard Wright urged black novelists to adopt a social consciousness and new responsibility, and insisted that black literature should not only honestly convey a sense of the oppression that blacks endured but should also give “meaning to blighted lives” and sustain a commitment to the “necessity to build a new world.” Novelists thus crafted stories that developed characters and explored themes—poverty, migration, unemployment, the struggle for housing, and racial injustice—that they believed would resonate with black readers. Central to the black social realist project was audience. As Stacy Morgan explains, writers of the black literary left “sought not merely to portray the masses, but in so doing to inspire a transformation of race and class consciousness within this audience.” Even if their tales of the fractured American dreams that black migrants found in American cities seem awash in despair, it is important to keep in mind that black social realists nevertheless retained an optimism in the capacity of their literary work to precipitate revolutionary social change.55 Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Literature,” in John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris, eds., Amistad: Writings on Black History and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1971), accessed at http://www.nathanielturner.com/blueprintfornegroliterature.htm; Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 19. On black social realists’ association with the Popular Front, see Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 183–193; and Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politcs, 1935–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 2–5. On black social realists’ critique of the Harlem Renaissance, see Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 1–4; and Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 263–267. In order to capture the lives of the black working poor in a politically and socially relevant literature, social realists adopted a documentary style. They knew the world that they portrayed. The impulse to incorporate documentary detail into their fiction came from several sources. Black novelists, such as Wright, William Attaway, and Dorothy West, worked as researchers for the Federal Writer's Project (FWP) of the WPA, where they uncovered, according to Sterling Brown, the FWP's Editor of Negro Affairs, “a vast store of information about American culture which might well have formed the basis for a new regional art.” Turpin, who worked as an investigator for the WPA in Harlem, spent three months of intensive research in Chicago in preparation for his family migration saga, O Canaan! (1939). He not only combed libraries for newspapers and archival records on black life in Chicago, but he interviewed South Side residents, resided in the homes of migrants, secured the cooperation of officials in the Urban League and other charities, and enlisted the invaluable assistance of a black social worker to reconstruct black city life in Chicago between 1915 and 1937. Wright and Ann Petry also worked for a time as journalists in the 1930s and 1940s and drew upon their work covering the social, labor, and living conditions of Harlem for material to inspire their fiction. As Petry explained in a 1971 interview, she built her novel The Street (1946) around a newspaper story about “a superintendent of an apartment house in Harlem who taught an eight-year-old boy to steal letters from mail boxes.”66 Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 113; James, “These Low Grounds of Sin and Sorrow,” 106–110; and Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 15–16, 244–246. Black novelists also looked to their own experiences as migrants for rich source material. Attaway's brief spell as a labor organizer informed Blood on the Forge (1941), his migration novel of race and unionism in the Pennsylvania steel mills of 1919. Wright based his first novel, Lawd Today!, written in the mid-1930s but published posthumously in 1963, on his experience as a mail sorter in the Chicago Post Office. The novel, as Arnold Rampersad explains, “is rooted in Wright's restless observation of the life about him” in Chicago. Chester Himes developed his character Bob Jones in If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945)—a semi-autobiographical novel that registered “the accumulation of [his] racial hurts”—based upon his own experiences living and working as an underemployed laborer in the California shipyards during World War II. New Orleans native Alden Bland incorporated his working experiences in Chicago during the Great Depression into his novel Behold A Cry (1947), which tells the story of a Mississippi migrant family's struggle to settle in World War I-era Chicago. In true documentary fashion, Bland gathered the material for the novel, he explained, “in streetcars, on elevated trains in wash rooms and public libraries,” which allowed the publishers to proclaim on the copyright page that “only the characters are fictional.”77 Robert Bone, “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,”Callaloo 28 (Summer 1986): 446–448; Arnold Rampersad, foreword to Lawd Today!, by Richard Wright (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993); Himes, Quality of Hurt, 75; and Alden Bland, Behold A Cry (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947). Social realists perhaps found their greatest inspiration—and subject matter—for their work in the investigations conducted by the black sociologists of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Influenced by the environmentalist approach to the study of urban life pioneered by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, scholars such as Charles Johnson, Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and E. Franklin Frazier compiled impressive empirical studies that located the sources of black urban poverty and social disorganization in the structural environment of the expanding ghettoes of the North. The social scientists of what came to be called the Chicago School of Sociology employed a documentary approach to their study of urban life. They compiled mountains of data and statistics, collected ethnographies of migrants, and conducted surveys of the housing and living conditions, settlement patterns, family relationships, educational facilities, recreational habits, and employment histories of black newcomers. Through Cayton's close friendship with Wright, the black sociologists developed a close association with the novelists and artists that gathered at Chicago's South Side Community Art Center. These relationships sparked a cross-fertilization between social science and literature that inspired work combining scholarly inquiry, a novelist's sense of literary style, and an activist's dedication to social change. In the sociologists' case studies and life histories, social realists found a rich record of migration's potential for bringing political empowerment and economic betterment to African Americans, but also chilling evidence of the obstacles that confined and frustrated migrants. Here lay compelling evidence that undermined entrenched racialist explanations of behavior. In a famous essay on the origins of his character Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of his 1940 protest novel Native Son, Wright explained the connections he saw between environmental factors and “extreme conduct.” Because Chicago “had more to offer” blacks than the South and because it dazzled “the mind with a taunting sense of possible achievement,” it left migrants “dispossessed and disinherited” amid “the greatest possible plenty on earth,” creating reactions “more obstreperous than in the South.” Wright and other social realists embedded their characters in a “concrete social environment” to develop a literature that explored the psychic costs and “the emotional and cultural hunger” that oppressed black migrants struggling to survive in a “fabulous city” of “extremes.” In the introduction to Black Metropolis, Cayton and Drake's two-volume comprehensive analysis of Chicago's South Side black community that stands as the signature example of Chicago School Sociology, Wright argued that the documentary evidence in the study confirmed the accuracy of Bigger Thomas. “If, in reading my novel, Native Son, you doubted the reality of Bigger Thomas, then examine the delinquency rates cited in the book; if, in reading my autobiography, Black Boy, you doubted the picture of family life shown there, then study the figures on family disorganization given here.”88 Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” in Native Son by Richard Wright (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005), 442, 446–447, 453; and Richard Wright, introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), xxi. On the influence of Chicago School Sociology on black social realism, see Bone, “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,” 453–457; Rodgers, Canaan Bound, 105–109; Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism, 246–247; and James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 271–276. On the South Side Community Arts Center, see Mullen, Popular Fronts, 75–105. These sociological studies, as well as the fiction that they inspired, produced what many regarded as a bleak vision of black urban life. The emphasis on the structural conditions of the ghetto produced portraits of residents who often lacked the resources to contest the forces of their oppression. The main protagonists in the novels of the social realists likewise struck readers as tragic victims of forces beyond their control. Characters such as Bigger Thomas in Native Son, Big Mat in Attaway's Blood on the Forge, Chris Wood in Carl Offord's The White Face (1943), Lutie Johnson in Petry's The Street (1946), and Ed Tyler in Bland's Behold A Cry stole, philandered, raped, and murdered out of fear and frustration. As novelist James Baldwin remarked in a famous critique of Native Son, “All of Bigger's life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear. And later, his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape.” Bigger Thomas became shorthand for the enduring stereotype of the faceless black male who inhabited a monolithic ghetto of oppression that few, if any, could ever escape. Those who appropriated that image, whether on the academic left or right, erased the fact that Chicago School Sociologists and black social realists had approached their work with an activist's faith that social science and art could spark social change, rather than disillusionment.99 James Baldwin, “Everybody's Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), 22. For a different reading of Native Son that insists upon Wright's ability to portray Bigger's humanity, see Donald Gibson, “Wright's Invisible Native Son,”American Quarterly 21 (1969): 728–738. On the wider connections between the research of black social scientists and social reform, see Francille Rusan Wilson, The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890–1940 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 115–172, 215–253; see also Joe William Trotter, “Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A Review of the Literature,” in Joe William Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4–12. In the 1960s and 1970s, when historians first took an interest in the Great Migration, they drew upon that reading of a narrative of urban despair. Concerned with establishing the history of ghetto formation, this generation of historians looked to those earlier sociological studies to locate the historical roots of nearly all-black ghettoes that by the 1960s had become centers of poverty, unemployment, decaying housing stock, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency, high homicide rates, police brutality, and riots. Their important studies of black neighborhoods in northern cities echoed the themes of social disorganization theory, measuring the impact of de facto segregation on black residents and documenting the manner in which a pervasive white racism circumscribed the development of black communities during the Great Migration. With their focus on place rather than people, they concluded that ghettoes produced maladjusted communities populated with marginal men.1010 Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, 1890–1930 (1963; revised edition, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971); Gilbert Osofsky, “The Enduring Ghetto,”Journal of American History 55:2 (September 1968): 243–255; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); and Thomas Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). By the 1980s, this interpretation of black migrants as entrapped victims of a dehumanizing ghetto began to fall out of favor. Historians became increasingly sensitive to the implications, indeed political consequences, of the narrative choices that earlier scholars had made about black migration and black urban life. As historian Adam Green reminds us, an emphasis on the “harsh realities of proscription” runs the risk of portraying black migrants as “history's victims, rather than its makers.” The unintended consequences of such an approach were evident in journalist Nicholas Lemann's widely read Promised Land, published in 1991. Primarily interested in locating the origins of the so-called urban underclass, Lemann argued that the black migrants who came north transplanted a culture of dependency that was rooted in the racial order of the rural, sharecropping South, which sapped them of the initiative and ambition to succeed in the urban North. Deprived of the skills, values, and work ethic needed to survive the pressures of modern, urban life, black migrants fell victim to substance abuse, criminality, high rates of teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency. Critics charged that if Lemann's analysis went unchallenged, it would validate behavioralist explanations of urban poverty and their emphasis on the social pathologies of urban black culture. Lemann's interpretation, aimed at a popular audience, gave further credence to the culture of poverty synthesis—pervasive in contemporary media and political dialogue—that informed and gave political legitimacy to the conservative assault on the welfare state in the 1990s.1111 Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991). See also Nicholas Lemann, “The Origins of the Underclass,”Atlantic Monthly 257 (June 1986): 31–61, and 258 (July 1986): 54–68. Lemann synthesized into his analysis the work of conservative social scientists such as Lawrence Mead and Charles Murray, who since the 1970s had been arguing that well-intentioned but misguided Great Society welfare programs, rather than alleviating urban poverty, encouraged social pathology among inner-city African Americans. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Free Press, 1986). Another influential work that contributed to the underclass debate was William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), which emphasized the structural conditions of urban ghettoes, not the culture of dependency migrants brought with them, as the source of black urban poverty. For critiques, see Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). To counter the persistence of the racial stereotypes that sustain the culture of poverty thesis, a new generation of historians has reconsidered the impact of the Great Migration on twentieth-century American social and political history. Many of these scholars see themselves as engaged, at least in part, in a search for a usable past to refute the intellectual foundations of contemporary conservative public policy. Because they saw echoes of Bigger Thomas and the marginal man thesis
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