American Fun Read online

  Slay me ’cause I’m in my sin.

  In Harlem, more intimately even than in Hollywood, celebrities like Rainey, Smith, and Waters walked and partied among the people—as the finest examples of the people. Corroborating Negro Digest’s claim that it was “fun to be a Negro” during the 1920s and 1930s, David Levering Lewis describes the common “pleasure” of “seeing celebrities” such as James Weldon Johnson, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson, Florence Mills, and countless other Harlem dwellers strolling through the “Campus,” the name given to the intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Celebrities heightened the frisson of the crowd, and in doing so with fellow feeling, as is evident in their populist songs and stories, they struck a syncopated jazz dynamic—a race, a dance, a competition—between soaring heights of individual freedom and the thumping rhythms of communal belonging. Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, for instance, were stars because they honored their racial community. They infused their every note with its heritage and invited the world to come along.

  Among Harlem’s celebrities who cherished their community while embracing their hard-won individual freedom was a rising generation of writers and artists. Musicians worked out their differences onstage in lively, showy cutting contests. These young intellectuals duked it out in print. Their poetry, novels, essays, and drama took bold new stances on African-American life. What resulted, among many other innovations, was American literature’s most thorough debate over the harms and health of what this book calls fun—or what J. A. Rogers calls “joyous revolt.” Following a century of blackface minstrelsy and primitivist fantasy, Harlem’s young talents gave their own impressions and at last brought clarity and dignity to a subject—fun, raw fun, African-American fun—that historically had been dismissed as ridiculous.

  IN THE MID-1920s, ranks started to form between the older generation of Harlem’s elite—a black professional class whom DuBois identified as African America’s “Talented Tenth”—and the younger generation of writers, artists, actors, and musicians who preferred to look beyond class differences. Much as it had been in revolutionary Boston, when John and Samuel Adams were divided over how the new rising citizens should behave, in Harlem the people’s fun became a bone of contention. DuBois wanted to showcase the highest black achievements. With the influx of slummers and the nightlife boom, blacks were too easily fetishized as primitives—a loathsome stereotype that hung like sandbags on the project of racial uplift. The younger crowd resented this stereotype as well, but they were much more likely, in spite of such popular misperceptions, to look for redemption in the “joyous revolt” of “average” blacks. In it they often saw the vitality of the race.

  Complicating matters was Carl Van Vechten. This white, gangly, forty-something Iowan threw some of the era’s wildest parties and floated among the intercontinental elite—literary, artistic, theatrical, musical, cinematic. He and his wife, Fania Marinoff (whom Bessie Smith once decked for kissing her goodnight), were close friends with Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge. Their celebrity acquaintances included Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, and William Randolph Hearst. And at some point in 1922, Van Vechten became, in his own words, “violently interested in Negroes,” an “addiction” that would lead him to spend the rest of the decade promoting black writers, musicians, and artists and giving distinguished white visitors “tours” of “authentic” Harlem.

  It was right in Van Vechten’s line to exploit Harlem’s pleasures, as he did most infamously in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926), whose crude title and sensationalistic, salacious content caused an uptown uproar and made this onetime Harlem celebrity persona non grata. Despite its showy arguments against racism, the novel’s fascination with Harlem’s “Coney Island” thrills and its fantasy of gaily primitive Africans only gave readers more complex caricatures than had appeared in recent white American literature—than “the fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room” of Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Congo” (1915), than the “glistening African god of pleasure” who plays ragtime piano in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918). Despite its attempts at psychological accuracy, many of Nigger Heaven’s characters, especially the lascivious Scarlet Creeper and the sex-starved Lasca Sartoris, are astonishing cartoons of black hedonism.

  W. E. B. DuBois called the novel “a blow in the face” and “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of white.” He took special umbrage at the novel’s “caricature” of Harlem life, “the wildly, barbaric drunken orgy in whose details Van Vechten revels.” But he, too, played an avuncular role to younger artists and was careful not to dismiss Harlem fun outright. He admitted “there is laughter, color, and spontaneity at Harlem’s core” but wished that someone of Van Vechten’s credibility would celebrate “the average colored man”—who attended church and was “as conservative and as conventional as ordinary working folk everywhere.”

  The younger generation voiced their own ideas of “the average colored man”—and they were neither Van Vechten’s nor DuBois’s. Two months prior to Nigger Heaven’s publication, the twenty-four-year-old poet Langston Hughes, a Columbia University dropout, tossed a firebomb in support of black-cultural art. He called in The Nation for revolt against the “race toward whiteness”—against petit-bourgeois black artists and their “desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization.” Taking implicit aim at their darling Countee Cullen, a gay poet who would marry DuBois’s daughter in the most elite black social event of the 1920s, Hughes (probably also gay) rejected the “smug, contented, respectable folk” (like Cullen’s parents) who scold their children not to “be like niggers.” Mocking the black middle class for their “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and … Episcopal Heaven,” he urged young black writers to celebrate the “low-down folks” who are in the “majority—may the Lord be praised!” The black urban poor—who were not at all “conservative,” by Hughes’s description—enjoyed “their nip of gin on Saturday nights” and lived by their sometimes dangerous whims. “Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy.… Play awhile. Sing awhile. Oh, let’s dance!” Even “their religion soars to a shout,” since “these common folk are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child.”

  Hughes had a personal investment in the subject. The people he praised resembled his easygoing mother and stepfather, who made their “money to spend” and “for fun”—as opposed to his racist and stingy father who scoffed at “Fun!” and “was interested in making money to keep.” Hughes believed the people’s fun told a truth all its own. Despite its risks and indiscretions, the fun of profligate, low-down folk revealed a vitality in black—and larger American—culture, if only the upper classes would listen: “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.” Many of Hughes’s peers heeded the call, and their writings of the 1920s and 1930s have deepened our knowledge of American fun.

  The A-list of these peers—Arna Bontemps, Richard Bruce, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson, and others—appeared that year in the sole issue of Fire!!, a journal “Devoted to Younger Negro Artists” that challenged Harlem’s literary establishment—namely, Charles Johnson’s Opportunity and W. E. B. DuBois’s Crisis. Its only editorial was a review of Nigger Heaven, in which Wallace Thurman, the journal’s notoriously hard-living editor, took pains to protect Van Vechten, a friend whose patronage is acknowledged on the journal’s masthead. Thurman predicted that “Harlem Negroes, once their aversion to the ‘nigger’ in the title was forgotten, would erect a statue on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, and dedicate it to this ultra-sophisticated Iowa New Yorker.” (Van Vechten had recently been lynched there in effigy.) At the same time, asserting the magazine’s autonomy, Thurman slams the novel’s “effusions about Harlem” for being “pseudo-sophisticated, semi-s
erious,” and “semi-ludicrous.” He also scoffs at “ignoramuses” who put any stock in the veracity of Nigger Heaven. Against both prudery and sensationalism, Fire!! defended verisimilitude—the artist’s duty to “delve into deep pots of raw life.” The magazine’s office was engulfed in flames, ironically incinerating most of Fire!!’s only issue and plunging Thurman deep in debt, but its brief flame illumined a fearless new aesthetic with which W. E. B. DuBois parted company, and whose scene he called the “debauched tenth.”

  THE FREEWHEELING SPIRIT of jazz kept Langston Hughes moving in the twenties and thirties. He had an irrepressible sense of fun. Mae Sullivan recalls Hughes being “adorable” and “always a little boy.” He was born in Missouri and often relocated with his mother and stepfather—to Lawrence, Kansas; Lincoln, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio. He spent two high school summers with his father in Mexico City, where he lowered a loaded gun he aimed at his own head because didn’t want to “miss something”—such as the “top of a volcano” or local bullfights, which he later discovered “must be smelt” for their “dust and tobacco and animals and leather.” Hughes survived to miss very little: he smelled, tasted, drank, and devoured the 1920s scene.

  When he first arrived in Harlem, he wanted “to shake hands” with the “hundreds of colored people,” but Columbia University, where he was racially shunned by his fellow students, was definitely “not fun.” Having enrolled to please his father, he dropped out after a year. Working as a mess boy on a boat off Staten Island, he rebuffed an invitation from the famous Alain Locke, who had read his poems and wanted to meet him; Hughes preferred the company of his fellow Jack Tars. At twenty-one, pulling out on a boat bound for Africa, he cut himself loose from academia and his father by dumping all his books in the sea. In the years to come, his life was his own. Whether admiring his fellow crewmembers’ “gaily mutinous state,” enduring hunger and racism in Paris, scorning the segregation within Washington’s black community, or losing the patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason for declaring he was not a “primitive,” Hughes stayed cheerful in the face of adversity and took inspiration from a defiant working class.

  During his year bussing tables in Washington, D.C., Hughes met Van Vechten and Vachel Lindsay, both of whom supported his writing and facilitated his celebrated return to New York. Downtown, he frequented parties of influential whites: Florine Stettheimer, Alfred A. Knopf, and Jack Baker (one of whose parties never took off because the black crowd was “hunched over” his vast erotic library, “trying to find out what white folks say about love when they really come to the point”). He was right at home chez Joel and Amy Spingarn and, naturally, chez Carl Van Vechten, who, Hughes wrote, never spoke “grandiloquently about democracy or Americanism” and never made “a fetish of those qualities” but rather “live[d] them with sincerity—and humor.” Uptown, Hughes attended anything and everything: the spectacular (but doomed) Cullen-DuBois wedding, the magnificent jazz funeral of A’Lelia Walker (“very much like a party”), the sober and sophisticated parties at Jessie Fauset’s, and all the “good-time gatherings” that he preferred—gumbo suppers at James Weldon Johnson’s, bohemian gatherings at Wallace Thurman’s. He excoriated the Cotton Club and its “Jim Crow policy in the very heart of [Harlem’s] dark community”; like the majority of Harlemites, he hated the “vogue” of being black among the “influx of whites” who were “given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in the zoo.” But he loved the “ball” to be had at Small’s Paradise and the “gaudy” drag balls at the Hamilton and the Savoy. Above all, he loved rent parties, where the hosts were usually anonymous and which were “more amusing than any night club.”

  Many of his poems, moreover, like Bessie Smith’s songs, were inspired by rent parties and cabarets, especially those published in his acclaimed first volume, The Weary Blues (1925), and in his generally despised (and unfortunately titled) second one, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). His earliest influences were Sandburg and Whitman, whose raw enthusiasm and populist voices suited his desire to reach a large public; also influential were the rhythms and phrasings of jazz and the blues, which helped him to express, as he put it, “the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” The first volume aestheticized “the Negro soul,” depicting even “low-down folk” with an elegance and purity that was well received by the African-American press; the second volume looked unblinkingly at their pain, pleasures, violence, and vitality. In both books the commoner’s daily abjection is soothed by rhythm and peaks of joy, but in the second, his rancor—and his candor—were called shameful, amoral, and disrespectful to the race. Time has told a different story. Fine Clothes to the Jew, writes the biographer Arnold Rampersad, “marked the height of his creative originality as a poet” and “remains one of the most significant single bodies of poetry ever published in the United States.”

  In the humblest and roughest ghetto scenes that make up Fine Clothes to the Jew, Hughes looked so intimately into average black people’s private lives (as he felt he understood them), and into their psychology and sexuality, that the critics spat back, J. A. Rogers (the advocate of jazz’s “joyous revolt”) calling the book “piffling trash”—“unsanitary, insipid, and repulsive”; others calling Hughes a “SEWER DWELLER” and the “poet ‘low-rate’ of Harlem,” and excoriating the “literary gutter-rat” Van Vechten, to whom the collection is dedicated, for being just the kind of reader to “revel in the lecherous, lust-seeking characters that Hughes finds time to poeticize about.” (Notably, however, amid this firestorm, DuBois’s Crisis published an appreciative review.) The book’s proximity to the Nigger Heaven scandal, and its association with Fire!!, where two of its poems had been previously published, drew close attention to its depiction of fun and its intimate look at poor urban blacks, although neither can be reduced to sensationalism.

  In contrast to all of the volume’s portraits of abjection—of the “Bad Man” who says “I beats ma wife” and “beats ma side gal too” or of “Gin Mary,” who regrets her prison sentence because she’ll miss her gin—is the hot-handed banter of poems like “Crap Game”:

  Lemme roll ’em, boy.

  I got ma tail curled!

  If a seven don’t come

  ’Leven ain’t far away.

  An’ if I craps,

  Dark baby,

  Trouble

  Don’t last all de time.

  Hit em’, bones!

  Here Hughes plays “hot” like a jazz soloist, ripping off riffs of casual street talk, capturing the sexy fun of the game while keeping the “Trouble” of its context. But when the poem pans back and takes in the crowd, more constructive pleasures emerge—Rogers’s “recreation for the industrious” and “tonic for the strong”: people are drawn into random contact by humor, music, and robust sexuality, revealing a Savoy Ballroom–style democracy that originates for Hughes in ghetto culture. This volume’s “Laughers,” a seeming nod to Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers,” catalogues and rejoices in the poet’s “people”—a catalogue that ranges from “Dish-washers” and “Crap-shooters” to “Nursers of babies”—for their hilarity “in the hands of Fate.”

  Dancers—

  God! What dancers!

  Singers—

  God! What singers!

  Singers and dancers

  Dancers and laughers.

  Laughers?

  Yes, laughers … laughers … laughers—

  Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands

  Of Fate.

  “Laughers” praises the people’s audacity, and “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret”—urging the band to “Play that thing!”—praises jazz for spreading that audacity into all corners of humanity: “Play it,” says the poem,

  for the lords and ladies,

  For the dukes and counts,

  For the whores and gigolos,

  For the America
n millionaires,

  And the school teachers

  Out for a spree.

  Hughes recognized a deep grammar in jazz. He saw the force in its folksy brilliance, in its polyglottal pleasures. It could lift a crowd above its differences to a common level of erotic pleasure:

  May I?

  Mais oui.

  Mein Gott!

  Parece una rhumba.

  Play it, jazz band!

  You’ve got seven languages to speak in

  And then some,

  Even if you do come from Georgia.

  Can I go home wid yuh, sweetie?

  Sure.

  The “joyous revolt” that Hughes and his peers observed in twenties America—the “joy” that ran “bang! into ecstasy”—sprang from a range of sources. For the “Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands / Of Fate” who migrated by the thousands from the violent Jim Crow South to the overcrowded and rioting northern cities, jazz and jazz dance and folk humor and partying were mutual forms of racial affirmation—forms of what Chaplin called the “defiance” of “ridicule.” For more affluent African Americans, especially those who were torn between racial identification and European-American class distinction, nightclubs and rent parties were weekend havens where Protestant rules were eased or suspended. For white slummers touring inner-city neighborhoods in hopes of experiencing “genuine” black fun, teeming dance floors were as close as most could get to losing themselves in the melting pot. And for the regular working-class denizens (whom J. A. Rogers called the “average Negro”), the years when “Harlem was in vogue” brought exposure, often overexposure, to pleasures their communities had known for centuries. These various groups were at odds. The dancers on these dance floors had cause for fearing, even hating, one another. And yet writers like Hughes and many of his peers, bearing witness to these parties, saw an eros that actually gained momentum from such cross-societal purposes. Its friction was exciting, part of the fun. In a decade when America’s public sphere was threatened by political and racial conflict, the jazz band emerged like old King Charles as a radically civil rabble-rouser. It urged wallflowers to jump to their feet and stomp and swing in amicable collision. The fun it demanded wasn’t for the timid, but those who acquired a taste for the fray were converts for the public good.