XXIX On Belonging to a Minority Group
It was in Africa that I was introduced to Nancy Cunard—an introduction by mail. Years before, when I saw her at a studio in Paris, she had been mentioned as a personage, but I had not been introduced. In Africa I received a pamphlet from Miss Cunard entitled Black Man and White Ladyship. The interesting pamphlet gave details about the Cunard daughter establishing a friendship with a Negro musician, of which the Cunard mother had disapproved.
Miss Cunard wrote that she was making a Negro anthology to dedicate to her Negro friend, and asked me to be a contributor. I promised that I would as soon as I found it possible to take time from the novel I was writing. That started an interesting correspondence between us.
Although I considered the contents of the Nancy Cunard pamphlet of absorbing interest and worthy of publication, I did not admire the style and tone of presentation.
After some months, Miss Cunard informed me that she was traveling to New York, and from there to the West Indies, including Jamaica. She asked me if I could introduce her to anybody in Jamaica who could put her in touch with the natives. I addressed her to my eldest brother, who is well-placed somewhere between the working masses and the controlling classes of Jamaica and has an excellent knowledge of both. From Jamaica Miss Cunard wrote again that she had landed in paradise after the purgatory of New York, where she was put in the spotlight by the newspapers, when it was discovered that she was residing in Harlem among the Negroes. My brother invited her to his home in the heart of the banana, chocolate, and ginger region of Jamaica, and she stayed there two weeks with her Negro secretary. Both she and her secretary wrote extolling my brother’s hospitality and the warmth and kindliness of the peasants. Miss Cunard said she particularly liked my brother’s face, and she sent me a snapshot of him.
Meanwhile I had come to the point of a breakdown while working on my novel in Morocco; and besides I was in pecuniary difficulties. Nevertheless I wrote an article for Miss Cunard’s anthology and forwarded it to her on her return to France. Miss Cunard extravagantly praised the article and said it was one of the best and also that I was one of the best, whatever that “best” meant. She said she would use it with a full-page photograph of myself which was done by a friend of ours, the photographer, Berenice Abbot.
However, she did not accompany her praise by a check, and I requested payment. I was in need of money. Miss Cunard replied that she was not paying contributors and that my article was too long after all. She was doing the book for the benefit of the Negro race and she had thought that every Negro would be glad to contribute something for nothing. She had suffered and sacrificed a fortune for Negroes, she said.
I comprehended Miss Cunard’s way of reasoning. Yet in spite of the penalty she had to pay for her interest in the Negro, I did not consider it my bounden duty to write for her without remuneration. Miss Cunard would have been shocked at the idea of asking the printers and binders to print and bind her charitable book without remuneration. But in spite of her ultra-modern attitude toward life, apparently she still clung to the antiquated and aristocratic and very British idea that artists should perform for noble and rich people for prestige instead of remuneration.
I might say that I too have suffered a lot for my knowledge of, and contact with, the white race. Yet if I were composing an anthology of the white hell, it never would have occurred to me that all sympathetic white writers and artists owed me a free contribution. I suppose it takes a modern white aristocrat to indulge in that kind of archaic traditional thinking.
As Miss Cunard would not pay for my article, I requested its return. She said she was going to take extracts from it. I forbade her to touch it. That made her mad, comme une vache enragée. My brother also was supposed to do an article on the Jamaica banana industry for Miss Cunard. He decided not to. And suddenly Miss Cunard did not like his face any more. She wrote that he was big and fat.
In her pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship the reader gets the impression that the Cunard daughter enjoys taking a Negro stick to beat the Cunard mother. Miss Cunard seemed to have been ultra-modern in ideas and contacts without alarming Lady Cunard, who was a little modern herself. Then Miss Cunard became aware of the Negro by way of jazz in Venice. And soon also she was made aware that her mother would not accept her friendship with a Negro. Other white women have come up against that problem. It is not merely a problem of people of different races; people of different religions and of different classes know the unreasonableness and the bitterness of it. The mother Cunard drastically reduced the income of the daughter Cunard. The daughter replied with the pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship, which was not published for sale but probably for spite. In telling the story of her friendship, Miss Cunard among other things ridicules her mother’s American accent. Yet the American Negroes she professes to like speak the same language as her mother, with slight variations.
Writing in her strange, heavy and ineffectual giant of a Negro anthology, Miss Cunard has this to say of me: “His people [the characters of my novels] and himself have also that wrong kind of race-consciousness; they ring themselves in.”
The statement is interesting, not so much from the narrow personal as from the broader social angle of a minority group of people and its relationship to friends who belong to the majority group. It leaves me wondering whether it would be altogether such a bad thing if by ringing itself in closer together, a weak, disunited and suppressed group of people could thereby develop group pride and strength and self-respect!
It is hell to belong to a suppressed minority and outcast group. For to most members of the powerful majority, you are not a person; you are a problem. And every crusading crank imagines he knows how to solve your problem. I think I am a rebel mainly from psychological reasons, which have always been more important to me than economic. As a member of a weak minority, you are not supposed to criticize your friends of the strong majority. You will be damned mean and ungrateful. Therefore you and your group must be content with lower critical standards.
A Fannie Hurst who is a best seller is interested in Negro literature. She is nice to Negro writers and artists. She visits among Negroes. She engages a Negro secretary. And finally she writes a trashy novel of Negro life. Negro critics do not like the novel. Fannie Hurst thinks they are ungrateful. I suppose the only way Negro critics could get around the dilemma would be to judge Fannie Hurst by social and sentimental instead of artistic standards. But that wouldn’t help the Negro literature that Fannie Hurst desires to promote. I think Negro writers might benefit more by the forthright criticism of such southern gentlemen as H.L. Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch than by the kindness of a Fannie Hurst.
A southern white woman who is married to a black journalist says, in a critique entitled, Don’ts for My Daughter, that she would not “want her to read Home to Harlem, which overemphasizes the carnal side of the Aframerican.” I will confess that I may fall short of that degree of civilization which perfects the lily-white state of mind of the gentle southern lady. And that was why as a creative writer I was unable to make nice distinctions between the carnal and the pure and happened perhaps to sin on the side of the carnal in Home to Harlem.
Yet I once read in a Negro magazine some stanzas entitled, Temptation, by a certain Young Southern White Lady, and attributed to my pure critic, which sound like a wild jazz page out of Nigger Heaven. I remember some of those stanzas:
I couldn’t forget
The banjo’s whang
And the piano’s bang
As we strutted the do-do-do’s
In Harlem!
That pansy seal
A-tossing me
All loose and free, O, lily me!
In muscled arms
Of Ebony!
I couldn’t forget
That black boy’s eyes
That black boy’s shake
That black boy’s size
I couldn’t forget
O, snow white me!
Now to the mind of this black sinner this piece of sophisticated lily-white lyricism is more offensively carnal than the simple primitive erotic emotions of the characters of Home to Harlem. But I reiterate it is possible that I am not civilized white enough to appreciate the purity of the mind which composed the above stanzas and to which Home to Harlem is carnal.
The white lady is raising her mulatto daughter on a special diet and periodically the child is featured as a prodigy in the New York Herald Tribune. But it is possible that when that child has grown up out of the state of being a prodigy she might prefer a plain fare, including Home to Harlem. I have not had the time to be an experimentalist about life, because I have been occupied always with facing hard facts. And this I know to be a fact: Right here in New York there are children of mixed parentage, who have actually hated their white mother after they had grown up to understanding. When they came up against the full force of the great white city on the outside and went home to face a helpless white mother (a symbol of that white prejudice) it was more than their Negroid souls could stand.
I think it would be illuminating to know the real feelings of that white mother, who was doubtlessly devoted to her colored children.... I myself have had the experience of a fine friendship with a highly cultured white woman, when I first arrived in the United States—a friendship which was turned into a hideous nightmare because of the taboos of the dominant white community. I still retain a bitter memory of my black agony, but I can only try to imagine the white crucifixion of that cultured woman....
I do not think the author of Don’ts for My Daughter, felt personally antagonistic to me, when she wrote in the leading Negro magazine that she did not want her child to read my novel. It is possible that like myself she has faith in literary and artistic truth. Perhaps she even desires to contribute something to the growing literature of Negro life. I have read an interesting article by her on “America’s Changing Color Line,” which emphasizes the idea that America is steadily growing darker in complexion, and is informing about the increasing numbers of white Negroids who are absorbed by the white group.
Without the slightest feeling of antagonism to my critic, I would suggest to her that vicarious stories of “passing white” are merely of slight importance to the great group of fifteen millions who are obviously Negroes. I would suggest to her that if she really desires to make a unique contribution to American literature, she has a chance of doing something that no Negro can—something that might be worthwhile for her daughter to read: she might write a sincere account of what it means for an educated and sensitive white woman to be the wife of a Negro in America.
Gertrude Stein, the high priestess of artless-artful Art, identifies Negro with Nothingness. When the eternal faddists who exist like vampires on new phenomena become fed up with Negro art, they must find a reason for their indifference. From being disappointed in Paul Robeson, Gertrude Stein concludes that Negroes are suffering from nothingness. In the ineffable Stein manner she decided to take Paul Robeson as the representative of Negro culture. Similarly, any other faddist could arbitrarily make Chaliapin or Al Jolson or Maurice Chevalier or Greta Garbo the representative of Russian, Jewish, French and Swedish culture respectively. When Gertrude Stein finds that Paul Robeson knows American values and American life as only one in it and not of it could, when she discovers that he is big and naïve, but not quite naïve enough to please Gertrude Stein, she declares: “The African is not primitive; he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing can happen.” Not long after she published this, something was happening: Negro Americans were rendering her opera Four Saints in Three Acts to sophisticated New York audiences.
Well, whatever the white folks do and say, the Negro race will finally have to face the need to save itself. The whites have done the blacks some great wrongs, but also they have done some good. They have brought to them the benefits of modern civilization. They can still do a lot more, but one thing they cannot do: they cannot give Negroes the gift of a soul—a group soul.
Wherever I traveled in Europe and Africa I was impressed by the phenomenon of the emphasis on group life, whether the idea behind it was Communist co-operative or Fascist collective or regional autonomy. I lived under a Communist dictatorship in Russia, two Fascist dictatorships in Europe, and the French colonial dictatorship in Morocco. I don’t like any dictatorship.
Yet even the dictatorships were making concessions to the strong awakened group spirit of the peoples. Soviet Russia was hard at work on the social problems of its many nationalities. Primo de Rivera in Spain had organized two grand exhibitions: one for discontented Catalonia and another for unhappy Andalusia. Regional groups such as that in Brittany and in the Basque country were reviving their ancient culture. Labor groups and radical groups were building up their institutions and educating their children in opposition to reactionary institutions.
But there is very little group spirit among Negroes. The American Negro group is the most advanced in the world. It possesses unique advantages for development and expansion and for assuming the world leadership of the Negro race. But it sadly lacks a group soul. And the greatest hindrance to the growth of a group soul is the wrong idea held about segregation. Negroes do not understand the difference between group segregation and group aggregation. And their leaders do not enlighten them, because they too do not choose to understand. Negro institutions and unique Negro efforts have never had a chance for full development; they are haunted by the fear of segregation. Except where they are forced against their will, Negroes in general prefer to patronize white institutions and support white causes in order to demonstrate their opposition to segregation.
Yet it is a plain fact that the entire world of humanity is more or less segregated in groups. The family group gave rise to the tribal group, the tribal group to the regional group, and the regional group to the national group. There are groups within groups: language groups, labor groups, racial groups and class groups. Certainly no sane group desires public segregation and discrimination. But it is a clear historical fact that different groups have won their social rights only when they developed a group spirit and strong group organization.
There are language groups and religious groups in this country that have found it necessary to develop their own banks, co-operative stores, printing establishments, clubs, theaters, colleges, hotels, hospitals and other social service institutions and trade unions. Yet they were not physically separated from other white groups as much as are Negroes. But they were in a stronger position to bargain and obtain social and political privileges by virtue of the strength of their own institutions.
But Negro institutions in general are developed only perfunctorily and by compulsion, because Negroes have no abiding faith in them. Negroes wisely are not wasting thought on the chimera of a separate Negro state or a separate Negro economy within the United States, but there are a thousand things within the Negro community which only Negroes can do.
There are educated Negroes who believe that the color line will be dissolved eventually by the light-skinned Negroids “passing white,” by miscegenation and final assimilation by the white group. But even if such a solution were possible in the future, it is certainly not a solution for the great dark body of Negroids living in the present. Also if the optimistic Negro advocates of futility would travel and observe or study to learn something of the composition and distribution of white racial, national and regional groups that are more assimilable than Negroes, and of their instinctive and irrational tenacity, they might be less optimistic and negative about the position of their own.
The Negro intelligentsia cannot hope to get very far if the Negro masses are despised and neglected. However poor it may be, the Negro intelligentsia gets its living directly from the Negro masses. A few Negro individuals who obtain important political and social positions among whites may delude themselves into thinking they got their jobs by individual merit alone against hungry white competitors who are just as capable.
But the fact is that the whites in authority give Negroes their jobs because they take into consideration the potential strength of the Negro group. If that group were organized on the basis of its numerical strength, there would be more important jobs and greater social recognition for Negroes.
And Negroes will have to organize themselves and learn from their mistakes. The white man cannot organize Negroes as a group, for Negroes mistrust the motives of white people. And the Negro whom they consider an Uncle Tom among the whites, whose voice is the voice of their white master, cannot do it either, even though he may proclaim himself a radical!
Many years ago I preserved a brief editorial from the Nation on the Woman’s Party which seemed to me to be perfectly applicable to the position of the Negro—if the word Negro were substituted for “woman” and “whites” for men. It said in part: “We agree that no party, left to itself, will allow women an equal chance. Neither labor nor the farmer nor the business man nor the banker is ready to assume executive and political ability in women. They will steadily, perhaps instinctively, resist any such belief. They will accede to women’s demands only so far as they wish to please or placate the woman vote. For every party job, for every political office, for every legal change in the direction of equality, women will have to fight as women. Inside the party organizations, the women will have to wage their own battle for recognition and equal rights....
“After all, women are an indivisible part of this country’s population; they cannot live under a women’s Congress and a special set of feminine laws and economic conditions. They, as well as men, suffer when our government is prostituted, and lose their employment when economic hardship sweeps the country. They, like men, have a vote, and like men they will in the long run tend to elect people and parties who represent their whole interest. To be sure, apart from men they have a special group interest....”
It would be altogether too ludicrous to point out that white women are by far more an indivisible part of this country’s population than Negroes! Yet the advance guard of white women realize that they have a common and special group interest, different from the general interests of their fathers and brothers and their husbands and sons.
It goes without saying that the future of the Negro is bound up with the future system of world economy. And all progressive social trends indicate that that system will be based on the principle of labor for communal instead of private profit. I have no idea how the new system will finally work out. I have never believed in the infallibility of the social prophets, even though some of their predictions and calculations have come true. It is possible that in some countries some of the captains of capitalist industry might become labor leaders and prove themselves more efficient than many reactionary labor leaders. Who knows?
Anyway, it seems to me that if Negroes were organized as a group and as workers, whatever work they are doing (with or without the whites), and were thus getting a practical education in the nature and the meaning of the labor movement, it might even be more important and worthwhile than for them to become members of radical political parties.
A West Indian charlatan came to this country, full of antiquated social ideas; yet within a decade he aroused the social consciousness of the Negro masses more than any leader ever did. When Negroes really desire a new group orientation they will create it.
Such is my opinion for all that it may be worth. I suppose I have a poet’s right to imagine a great modern Negro leader. At least I would like to celebrate him in a monument of verse. For I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence. And all I offer here is the distilled poetry of my experience.