Joe Edelmann
Marchin' Shoes, The Blues, and Langston Hughes

Deep, dark, and play, plAY, PLAY. Blue notes whine in between the stepping stones of a skipping melody. B flat half-stepping its way over gaps in the G scale sees below it a people with no mule and no forty acres to fence it in. The jazz band's playing loud to drown out the constant hum of history that's been holding their swing hostage for too long.

Deep in the darkness at the back of the cabaret, black dancers feel the ache in their knees and stomp it into the floor with sweat on their foreheads and smoke in their noses. They're jumping to an echo of the same beat that shook their families loose from the delta and bounced them into Harlem just a decade before.

On the stage, swooning with a microphone wire sliding down her thigh in a white sequined dress is a woman who calls herself "mama' and you're her baby, though you've never seen her before in your life. She smiles when she tells you she loves you, but there are tears in her eyes because she knows that loving you just ain't gonna pay her electricity this month. There are sobs in the pauses of her song, and when she has to hang her head for lack of breath she clasps her chest and swallows hard hoping that the pain won't steal words from her throat.

She's singing, they're playing and dancing, and the notes are falling from swaying brass bells and sliding through the curves of everyone's ears and they nod "yes' "cause they know the backstory. They are the backstory. They know why those blue notes shake when they try to hold on too long. And why those sharps and those flats are stumbling out of the stiff regiments of their major scales. They've been marching too long.

Those notes and the words that rise and fall right along with them have been on the move for hundreds of years and seen both sides of the American continent. They're tired of moving and leaving no footprints, so they're laying down a rhythm and a story that's gonna let everyone know where they've been. The poets and storytellers of the Harlem Renaissance are the preservation of that story.

It’s 1920. Mid-city Manhattan. Okeh Records out of Chicago has just released Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues, and everyone’s crazy for it. Even the white people.

"Course, if they'd known it was supposed to be called the Harlem Blues, they might have stayed away. Maybe. It's hard to resist that calling horn, no matter who you are. And if you happen to be black, you start feeling like Koko Taylor, "you got your kids to feed, you got your rent to pay . . . and all of a sudden you realize you got the blues" (I'll Make Me a World).

They're contagious, and they're hard, and you never want to stop listening.
There's a sensuality in the blues. The music is in a heartbeat. It's physical. When that band starts to play, it's your body that immediately begins to sway. There's ecstasy in the throbbing backbeat and wild Dionysian lust in the eyes of its disciples. The blues move without a single thought and forget you when they're gone. They don't have a curfew and no one could enforce it if they did. The blues are a feeling that can grab a listener by his jugular and play on his own misery or remind him what it feels like to forget pain altogether. The best can do both at the same time.

The double-sided nature of the blues, that ability they have to make you want to end it all with your head in the oven and rise above it with joy and glory in your heart at the same time is the life-blood of the black American fight for first-class citizenship.

There's conflict inherent in their search for cultural recognition and societal equality. They refused to let their cultural soul become a martyr to bland assimilation--another ingredient in the melting pot that will eventually come out gray like everything else. But there was also a yearning for some assimilation, to be considered Americans with personalities outside of the black-faced vaudeville "mammie' always mumbling "yes ma'am' and "no su'' with a dishrag on her hair. And deep in the foundation of the epic battle for recognition, black Americans still had to pay the rent and feed the kids.

W.E.B. Dubois called it "two-ness', the struggle for the black American to not:
bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes--foolishly, perhaps, but fervently--that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of development (Hutchinson, p. 78).

It's in the blues, it's in the art, and it's especially in the written words of black Americans, and it reached its paramount position on the American cultural stage in what is sometimes stuffily labeled the "New Negro Movement' and more commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance. It is thought to have begun at the Civic Club Dinner, an event put on by the editors of Opportunity -- the monthly publication of the National Urban League -- to unite black writers and white publishers. Following that event, the work of black American authors, poets, and playwrights burst onto the American literary scene and gave it the rhythm that it so desperately needed. However, the idea of the Harlem Renaissance, and the emotion that was its seed had long been a part of the black American paradigm.

"The Harlem Renaissance was basically a psychology--a state of mind or an attitude--shared by a number of black writers and intellectuals," (Wintz, p. 2). The "New Negro' wasn't some superbreed, no uber-black man come to show the white people what's-what. The "New Negro' was a paradigm, a mind-set cultivated by the likes of W.E.B. Dubois, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, and fleshed out in the work of visual, musical, and verbal artists within or with close relation to the black American community of the time. It was a determined response to the continued subjugation of a people, a people that fought and died for the country that hated them. It was a refusal to continue waiting for empowerment, and a determination to start living it.

The artists of the Harlem Renaissance found a universal element in the blues, their blues, and brought it into the world in as many ways as there were forms of expression. And the community they formed spoke louder than the Declaration of Independence: Black Americans were screaming their blues, and the microphone was in Harlem.

With a heavy history trailing long behind, a music to keep its time, and a pride that was demanding a voice to be heard, this borough buried in the center of New York City became the apex of black American expression. It was Harlem's Renaissance.

The Weary Blues
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . . .
He did a lazy sway .
. . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
-- The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes, 1926

"The Weary Blues" have the squeak-tap, squeeeeeaaaak-tap feeling of an old leather shoe hanging off the leg of an old harmonica man, blind in a rocking chair. He's just lazin' on the sun-bleached two-by-four porch right off the front of his one-room, two-by-four, sun-bleached house. Doesn't seem like there's a thing but that squeak-tap, deep sigh rhythm on his mind. He's got the blues and he's been quiet all his life. "Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool/He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool./Sweet Blues!." He's been quiet and decided that no one'd listen if he wasn't, "Coming from a black man's soul/O Blues!"

Thousands and thousands of black Americans at the end of the nineteenth century were fed up with the complete enmity of the white supremacist south toward them and their people and began a migration to the Promised Land above them. They were going to plant their roots in the progressive ñ progressing industrial cities of the north.

It wasn't that they had nothing in the south. The south was their roots, at least the roots that they had grown since they'd been transplanted in the United States. Entire folk traditions had come from the south, strong traditions that weren't so easy to just give up. Stories, songs, poetry; even an entire language was being left behind. The language that black Americans spoke in the rural south was poetry, and it was cast aside as being "senseless'.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, a black American poet of the late nineteenth century, captured that language before it could be silenced. He was a first lone voice in what would become the million-part chorus of the Harlem Renaissance, though he suffered criticisms from later Renaissance poets regarding his use of patois, or idiomatic language, and the audience it invariably attracted. "The audience was primarily made up of white readers familiar with the "Negro dialect' of literature depicting blacks through exaggerated, comical images" (Donalson, p. 128).

It can be argued that Dunbar's work set back the dignified recognition of black Americans by several decades; however, it is not so. His poetry is a preservation of a culture and a language that would be totally lost had he not written it down. Think if Chaucer had never captured the Middle English dialect in his Canterbury Tales. The southern black vernacular is a part of the American tradition that should not be forgotten.

Tek a cool night, good an' cleah,
Skiff o' snow upon de groun';
Jes' "bout fall-time o' de yeah
W'en de leaves is dry an' brown;
Tek a dog an' tek a axe,
Tek a lantu'n in yo' han',
Step light whah de switches cracks,
Fu' dey "s huntin' in de lan'.
-- From Poems of Cabin and Field, Dunbar, 1899

Zora Neale Hurston also knew what was being lost in the move, and did what she could to salvage the lore of the black south from extinction. She, like Dunbar, took flak for her grass roots campaign. But even she gave her loyalties to the north for a while, leaving Eatonville, Florida ñ her first home, to get herself a more "sophisticated' education in schools in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The dire economics of being black in the south at the turn of the century were more than enough to convince most that the south was no longer home. By 1915, the beginnings of World War I, the massive exodus northward was at its peak.

During the beginning of the war there was already depression sweeping across the southern states, due in part to crop infestation (boll weevils and their hungry cousins), and flooding. The war marked a sharp increase in crop prices, but, per usual, didn't do a whole lot to raise working wages. Workers were toiling twice as hard to keep up with climbing demand and seeing nothing but more blisters on theirs hands in return. The north, however, was losing immigrant industrial labor because of the war, and so facilitated a kind of job osmosis for American blacks: they moved from an overcrowded and underpaying system to one that had significantly higher wages and lots of room. Of course, the room was in jobs, not necessarily in living space.

As blacks continued to move northward, it became clear that the northern United States was no more "a place of refuge where equality and racial justice abounded" than the southern (Wintz p. 15). They found the same discrimination here that helped make up their minds to leave the rural south. The same doctrines of racial inferiority and extermination prevalent in books like Frederick L. Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896) were the standards by which they were measured. And damned if people weren't willing to fight to keep them in place.

Businesses were still very much segregated, and as more blacks came, more schools, theaters, restaurants, and hotels closed to them. And, as the migration pushed them further and further north, Harlem became the net that caught the most people, becoming the epicenter of black American activity. All black activity, mind you, including the vice and debauchery that has become synonymous with inner-city life.

Said Gilbert Osofsky:

[The] most profound change that Harlem experienced in the 1920s was its emergence as a slum. Largely within the space of a singly decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially ideal community to a neighborhood with manifold social and economic problems called "deplorable, unspeakable, incredible'" (Wintz, p. 24)

Riots were almost a norm in the first few decades following the turn of the century, resulting in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of black Americans. Lynching gained in popularity between 1917 and 1918, and "[in] Tennessee three thousand spectators responded to the invitation of a local newspaper to come out and watch a "live Negro' being burned" (Wintz p. 13).

The tables turned fundamentally, though, during the war, when black Americans were recruited to fight. The Army gave black soldiers less of a chance than they had in civilian life: most of the fringe benefits usually available to soldiers were reserved solely for whites. But the black soldiers were given the same training as whites, and the same weapons, and they had more to fight for here than overseas. Now, in several riots like the armed march of black soldiers against white police that took place in 1917 Houston, black people were fighting back, sometimes even instigating violence against whites. The militancy engendered by the war, and the sense of self-worth that came with it, would lend a great deal to the confidence of the Harlem Renaissance.

Militancy among black Americans took forms other than outright physical violence. Those black people that felt the futility of wanting to create some understanding among the majority began to turn inward. As they flooded Chicago, Springfield, New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and the other bright, hopeful cities north of the Mason-Dixon line, black neighborhoods began to form. The cities offered them only a small amount of living space, and so they found themselves hemmed in by the stories and hardships of others like them. Fledgling communities, like that emerging in Harlem, facilitated "a shift "from social disillusionment to race pride,'" as Alain Locke describes it (Wintz, p. 30). In Harlem especially -- 95.1 percent black by 1930 -- the white influence was steadily losing control of black America's future.

Intellectuals, living in such close quarters with people that had been forced from their homes with anger like a foot on their hearts, saw the potential for a new paradigm. Their hopes to ever convince whites of the worth of black America were dwindling, so they set about cultivating a sense of pride amongst themselves. It was in this atmosphere of self-reliance that Marcus Garvey rallied a massive following with his call for "Africa for Africans at home and abroad.'
Garvey, a Jamaican-born disciple of Booker T. Washington's belief in the strength and ability of the black community to establish itself, set out to convince the residents of the newly forming American ghettos of the true beauty of the black race. To accomplish his goal, he organized the most popular mass movement that black America had ever seen, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In this spirit of self-ownership and pride in the origins of black Americans, Countee Cullen wrote:

Heritage
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me? . . .
--Countee Cullen, 1925

Racial pride and self-help were the canvas on which the artists, intellectuals, and poets of the Harlem Renaissance threw their colors and words and blues. Declared Langston Hughes, "We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves" (Janken, p. 90). And just like everybody's got their own version of the same old story, so did the poets of the Renaissance have truths and remedies. Weary no more, the blues hopped on the A train and stepped off with a swing and a pride in its step that looked a lot like jazz.

If We Must Die
If we must die, let____
it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! . . .
--Claude McKay, 1922 (Cornerstones, p. 135)

Claude McKay believed in an angry, "we're not gonna take it' truth. It was the truth of revolution. He called his black community to arms to prove themselves against the adamantly territorial whites roaming the streets with ropes and guns and clubs. He was not interested in bargaining anymore. For him and his people, pleading would only ever get them the short end of the stick. He admonished them to forget the pacifistic ideals of integration by vote and political maneuvering according to the standards of intellectuals like W.E.B. Dubois. The bullet-hole exclamation points at the end of his verses, and the regimental, left-right-left rhythm of the words seem to imply something of a disgust with the lethargic progress of integration. Black Americans were still forced into poverty, had to fear for their lives when they came across a white person, and could not even publish their writing without the support of white patronage.

There were no black publishing houses in the 1920s, (and no black record labels either, resulting in the change in title of the Harlem Blues) so everything published during the Harlem Renaissance had first to go through the scrutiny of the whites in literary power. Many black writers, like Zora Neale Hurston, had to rely on direct financial support from private white patrons for much of their work. As is to be expected, a cluster of conflicts arose from these psuedo-philanthropic relationships.

Hurston was an author, poet, and anthropologist who devoted her career to the study of folklore among rural southern blacks. Her trips through the southern states were funded by her patron, an older white woman by the name of Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason. Mrs. Mason hired Hurston strictly in the interest of anthropology. She was, as were many members of the wealthy older generation of Americans, a collector of sorts. But it wasn't stamps or Indian head pennies she was after -- no, Mrs. Mason was a connoisseur of culture, especially those cultures considered "primitive' in the eyes of many during her lifetime. A collector with no interest in the bolstering of the black community at large, she forbade Hurston to publish any of her work. So Zora Neale severed ties with Mrs. Mason and lost her funding, though she did not stop writing. After her break with Mrs. Mason, Hurston published a number of her stories and essays, as well as a play, The Great Day, in various black publications and with the assistance of other Renaissance artists.

White patronage called into question the honesty of an author's work. If the work had first to be okayed by a white publisher, was that work speaking directly to the black people that were its intended audience, or was it written solely to satisfy the white publisher? "The black writer both thrived and suffered, torn between well-meant encouragement from the white race to preserve his racial identity (usually described as "primitivism') and a misguided encouragement from his own race to emulate the white one" (Kellner, p. 93).

"[If] white people are pleased, we are glad," Langston Hughes once said, "If they are not, we don't care" (I'll Make Me a World). A safeguard was in place that could protect the integrity of black literature. Both the NAACP and the National Urban League sponsored publications highlighting the black literary community. They were The Crisis, and Opportunities, respectively; the former edited by W.E.B. DuBois. "Not Alms but Opportunity," was the slogan on the cover of every issue of Opportunity. These newspapers were devoted to the promulgation of black American literature in all its forms. Both sponsored literary awards and served as liaisons to the white publishing world.

DuBois ceased giving literary awards when his disapproval of the direction of the Harlem Renaissance created a schism in his personal interests. His loyalties had always been geared toward the ideals of social reform, not necessarily the furthering of artistic merit. The figureheads of the Harlem Renaissance, however, were more interested in creating legitimate art than in working for a political cause. They competed with other writers, not just with whites. It would be a compromise of artistic vision and a cheapening of the medium to use it solely as intentional propaganda. And anyway:

[the] facts about Negroes in the United States are themselves propaganda . . . A Negro novelist who tells the simple story of any aspiring colored man or woman will call as with a bugle the minds of all just persons, white or black, to listen to him (Van Doren, Opportunity, May, 1924, p. 145).

Truth in art is propaganda always.

To a Black Dancer in “The Little Savoy”
Wine-maiden
of the jazz-tuned night,
Lips
Sweet as purple dew,
Breasts
Like the pillows of all sweet dreams,
Who crushed
The grapes of joy
And dripped their juice
On you?
--Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, p. 35)

The blues are a people. Their stories are most important. The Harlem Renaissance was primarily an extension and preservation of culture, the collection of the myths and legends of black life in America. The poets that worked in its context were the ears and the minds that recorded the era that came to be known as the Jazz Age. But, they were by no means confined to that period of time, or any, for that matter. As long as black people have been oppressed on the American continent, there have been reactions that resemble those of the Harlem Renaissance.

When James Weldon Johnson wrote in The Creation, "And God stepped out on space,/ And He looked around and said,/ "I'm lonely--/I'll make me a world'", he described, with all intent or none, the transformation of Harlem from a pinnacle of slave-trade efficiency into the black Mecca of the world, "containing more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth" (Johnson, p. 4). He was heir to the fourteen black Americans that first saw New York City, felt their roots at his feet and saw their legacy in the streets of Harlem. Those fourteen people took a look at the desolate future of blacks in their new country and became the Adams and the Eves of American black culture.

The state of New York was, before it was New York, part of the Dutch Colony of New Netherland, founded in 1623. New York City was purchased along with Manhattan Island by Governor Peter Minuit and dubbed New Amsterdam in 1626. Along with the Dutch settlers, eleven black men and three black women could be called New Amsterdamites. They constituted about five percent of the population, but by no means had they intended to be there.

In 1664, the Dutch in New Amsterdam were conquered by the English -- a people that were apparently better schooled in the logistics of the legitimate slave trade. Through the management of their other colonial territories, the English had found the slave trade to be a profitable and worthwhile venture. This being the case, in 1709 Wall Street, then the location of a large slave-market, claimed its first humbled victims. Now, of course, it is the location of the world's largest stock market, where people still sell others' labor as well as much of their own well-being.

The population of New York in 1709 included around 2,200 blacks, just over thirteen percent of the total (Johnson p. 5). It was soon after that the white colonialists would learn that black skin did not indicate an absence of will. The Negro Insurrection of 1712 was the great-grandfather of all American race riots to follow. As James Johnson paraphrases the event in Black Manhattan:

On April 6. 1712 twenty-three Negro slaves met about midnight in the orchard of one Mr. Cook, in the middle of town, for the purpose of destroying as many of the inhabitants as they could to revenge themselves for the hard usage they felt they had received from their masters . . .One of them . . . set fire to an outhouse of his master . . . and a crowd of townspeople flocked to it. The band of insurgents opened fire on the crowd, killing nine citizens and wounding five or six others. (Johnson, p. 7)

Twenty-nine years later, 1n 1741, blacks again wrote their own place in the formative history of New York. Unfortunately, the "conspiracy to burn New York and murder its inhabitants", as it was deemed, though impeccably clear, sounds like the plot of a B horror movie. Unexplainable fires began to spring up all over the city and for lack of any hard evidence, black citizens by the dozens were corralled into prison, a reaction easily viewed in any of a number of films documenting the Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century. After discovering suspects that could be linked in any way to the fires, the people of New York served them their punishments. There were eighteen hangings, more than seventy deportations, and fourteen condemnations to be "burned alive with a slow fire until he is dead and consumed to ashes" (Johnson p. 10).

Tales of the oppression and brutal violence of black Americans are nothing new, and generally serve only to rehash worn out, albeit poignant, themes. However, the abusive infant history of Harlem serves as more than a preamble to the degradation of blacks that would follow into the current century. There was a bright side to the black plight that had more impact than if the whole of New York City had burnt to the ground.

Fighting whips with flames served only to increase the penalties against black people, so they put down their torches and started using words. The events that took place in early Harlem lose almost complete meaning without the reactions that they inspired. By picking up their pens and appealing to the intellect of their oppressor, the black peoples of New York began what would be carried on at a later date in the Harlem Renaissance.

The end of the Revolutionary War saw an American people examining its own hard-won freedom, and, as a result, imbued with a more compassionate view of those whose freedom they had stolen. In January, 1785, the "Society for the Promotion of the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of them as have been or may be Liberated', or "Manumission Society' was formed (author's note: manumission ñ formal emancipation of slaves). Small steps in the way of emancipation were taken in 1799, but the real ground was made on July 4, 1827, when an act emancipating all slaves and abolishing slavery in the state of New York was passed. Every northern state except New Jersey had already taken this step, but New York took it more seriously than most. The state became a bastion for those on the side of nationwide abolition, and an important stop on Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad.

In the same year as New York's abolition of slavery, the first black newspaper in American history, Freedom's Journal, came into publication. "We wish to plead our own cause," it said, "Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations" (Freedom's Journal , 1). Long before Marcus Garvey's campaign of self-determination for the black citizens of the world, and Claude McKay's refusal to go quietly in, If We Must Die, the black people of America were standing up and speaking their minds. Dozens of black publications followed from New York and continued until the end of the Civil War, when most of the editors of these papers felt, wrongly, that their struggle had come to an end. It wasn't long, though, until the intellectual revolution of black America resurfaced and put some color back into the pallid facade of American literature.

We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, --
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.
-- Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 -1906)

The Harlem Renaissance was, in every degree of the artistic spectrum that it occupied, the revelation of what would become modern American culture. Blues, jazz, and their incarnations in the forms of black American poetry, literature, visual arts, and contemporary music lend a "roach's-eye view of everything," as poet Amiri Baraka calls it, to American culture. It's a view of everything from the bottom up, from the people being crushed by the system that never bothers to look down and see what's squirming under its shoe. In this way, the Harlem Renaissance has given America a much clearer picture of itself. To quote Carl Van Doren at the onset of the Renaissance:

What American literature decidedly needs . . . is color, music, gusto, the expression of gay or desperate minds. If the Negroes are not able to contribute these moods, I do not know what Americans are (I'll Make Me a World).

At the same instant that black America refused to but its mask back on, it succeeded in tearing the mask off of culture in the United States. The Harlem Renaissance was one of the first movements toward the liberation of the true American identity.

Works Cited
Cornish & Russwurm, eds. "To Our Patrons." Freedom's Journal. Mar. 16,
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Cullen, Countee. "Heritage." Cornerstones: An Anthology of African American
Literature. Ed. Melvin Donalson. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. 144-148.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. Poems of Cabin and Field. New York: Dodd, Mead,
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----, "We Wear the Mask." Cornerstones: An Anthology of
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Giovanni, Nikki. Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the
Harlem Renaissance Through Poems. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996.
Hughes, Langston. The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1926.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Jonah's Gourd Vine. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge:
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