Scientific Advisor: Prof. Michaela Mudure [610527]
1
Dana Contras,
PHD student: [anonimizat]: Prof. Michaela Mudure
Consumption of Blackness Throughout the Harlem Renaissance
While researching texts written by women authors during the Harlem
Renaissance period, it was utterly shocking to find out that women’s writing was
almost obliterated, or, it was not wished that women be involved in the Negro
Movement whatsoever. There has been a lot of debate about the AfricanAmerican
artists, writers, entertainers and intellectuals who entered the public scene of the
Harlem Renaissance during the first half of the 20
t h
century, also wellknown and
welldocumented category worth mentioning is that of white men who supported
and encouraged this outpour of creativity and energy using their influence and
wealth.
One ought not to change or forget the white women who were not afraid of
being excluded by their wealthy families in exchange for a glimpse of Harlem
realities. One would say that these women’s stories could be the last untold story
of the Renaissance. What these women did, was by the standards of the day
unthinkable; that is to say, they went as far as to choose blackness over whiteness
thus investing time, money and their entire being to become part of it. The
collective name given to all of these women who interfered in Black Harlem is
Miss Anne. There was a general awareness of the term in the black community,
but the white societal faction was completely oblivious of it. Black community
was aware of the term, but it was completely unfamiliar among the whites. There
seem to be theories claiming that the term had been coined by black females well
before the Harlem Renaissance, by black females who were Southern, domestic
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workers, employed in the service of white women employment that could
extend from twelve to fourteen hours a day which did not allow for any form of
derision or disrespect towards those women employers, nevertheless, they would,
however refer dismissively to them as Miss Anne in fact, the counterpart of Miss
Anne is the derisive term Mr. Charlie or Mr. Eddie.
All these white women of the Black Renaissance were fascinating in their own
way but there was something they all had in common and that would be the
burning desire to break into a world of novelty, expansion, art, and make their
presence known and felt by the black community of Harlem. Every one of them
shared an idea, very novel in the 1920s, that identity could be something other
than biology, and everyone of them, believed that they could in essence volunteer
for blackness. Each of them was in black Harlem, or writing about it in an effort
to speak up for themselves and to be assimilated by black culture, in other words
they were more than willing to become black, too which was appalling for the
white community, moreover, some of them were ostracized for having entered a
forbidden world. All of them were thought to have been rulebreakers committed to
passion and fair play, they wanted to escape from the routine of middle class or
upper middle class womanhood and all the restrictions within their families, some
would state that they were even looking for a purpose in their lives. Some of the
white women involved in this movement were seen as liberators for the blacks
even to the point that they were embraced by them, blending nicely into the
background, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, a Texan heiress wanted to be perceived
as black, passing for a black woman when she married the famous black
Harlemite George Schuyler, on the other hand Fannie Hurst was continuously
attacked by critics, both white and black, for making use of Zora Neale
Hurston’s plot lines so, to everyone’s surprise she was not very much appreciated
nor liked, nevertheless she did make a lasting impression and played a major role
in Harlem.
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FANNIE HURST IN HARLEM
“Although it’s a “white” novel
, Imitation of Life
is certainly a part of the African
American canon”.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Imitation of Life
may be, as Gates ruefully notes, the most notable white authored
“black novel” ever written. “Since its initial publication,
Imitation of Life
. . . has
occupied a singular position in American culture, haunting it more persistently perhaps
than any twentiethcentury popular text about race other than
Gone with the Wind
.” A
representation of interracial friendship produced by a white Jewish author who was once
the most famous—and highly paid— writer in the country, the novel had a remarkable
shelf life, beyond any of Fannie Hurst’s other novels, even in her heyday. The
relationship between the novel’s main characters, Bea and Delilah, has influenced
generations of ideas about friendships between white and black women. And Fannie’s
connection with Zora Neale Hurston, including their collaboration on
Imitation of Life
,
remains one of the most famous interracial friendships in American history. Yet Fannie
Hurst’s Harlem story is a fundamentally unhappy one, her vision of black life at least as
pernicious as it was salutary. Harlem embraced Hurst at a difficult time. She repaid that
embrace in peculiar, but very telling ways. Harlem gave extraordinary latitude to its
interested whites. Carl Van Vechten was given entrée to blackonly clubs, invited to
judge drag balls, and allowed by many to use the forbidden “Nword.” Mary White
Ovington was acknowledged as a and sometimes the founder of the NAACP, the
nation’s most important black civil rights organization. Josephine Cogdell Schuyler was
encouraged to pass as a black advice columnist, and white torch singer Libby Holman
was celebrated for her Broadway impersonation of a black prostitute. Ernestine Rose was
roundly praised for making Harlem’s public library the most important black cultural
institution in the country. Although white, Annie Nathan Meyer was credited with
having an important Negro voice. Dictatorial patron Charlotte Mason was adored and,
when adoration became impossible, obeyed (until she was finally ignored). Even with a
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deaf ear for others’ feelings and a propensity for embarrassing publicity, Nancy Cunard
was widely admired for her loyalty to her black lover and her dedication to the
Negro
an thology. But latitude had its limits. And Fannie Hurst, as much a “Negrotarian” as
New York ever produced, exceeded them.
Though wildly successful with white readers, Hurst’s blockbuster 1933 novel
struck Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and other blacks as a betrayal of the friendship
they had shown her. The novel’s black characters—Hurst’s only
black characters in her
eighteen novels—recycle stubborn racial stereotypes. Like so many paper cutouts, they
embody what the Harlem Renaissance struggled to stamp out. They are childlike. They
emulate whites and denigrate blacks. They lack dignity. They are foolish. They are
impractical but warm, quick to laugh and slow to anger. The novel was a “sensation in
Harlem” ( Cherene Sherrard Johnson, 241) partly because in it the bestknown writer in
America paid attention to black lives. But by 1933, many white writers had already
beaten Hurst to that punch.
Imitation of Life
was “a sensation in Harlem”(241) mostly
because it was so much not
what a very expectant Harlem had hoped for from Hurst.
Fannie Hurst was born in 1889 in Hamilton, Ohio, and raised in St. Louis in a
“quiet house of evenly drawn window shades, impeccable cleanliness, geometrically
placed conventional furniture, middleclass respectability.” The only child of
uppermiddleclass, assimilated Jewish parents, she grew up hoping to be nothing like
them. Her mildmannered father was withdrawn. Her mother was actively engaged with
others, but also “temperamental” and dramatic, demanding a center stage that Fannie
wanted for herself. Fannie considered her mother smallminded and shallow. She wished
for parents with hobbies and fascinating friends. “We did not know anybody who was
anybody,” she complained. For both parents, household minutiae, and their daughter
especially, were their all. Her father read the newspaper—husbands always read the
newspaper—but did not discuss national affairs. “Intellectual curiosity was languid at
our house.” The Hursts were especially protective — a younger sister had died of
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diphtheria at the age of four, but not demonstrative. By her own description, Fannie was
a “rather spoiled, overweight brat of a child, living snug as a bug in the middleclass
middlewestern socalled security of a pre first worldwar era.” She took her boredom
as an affront. She was headstrong from day one about her eventual escape from the
“somnolent world” in which she was raised. A “wetblanket of conservatism,” she
judged it. From childhood on, she was hard at work becoming fascinating. She was
determined to make herself broadminded, intellectual, socially engaged, and
unconventional—everything she believed that her parents were not. One of her greatest
strengths was her phenomenal willpower. As an adult, Fannie lost a great deal of weight
and allowed herself to become almost as famous for her dieting as she was for her
writing. Having a fashionable figure so was important to her that to maintain it she
managed to subsist for decades on a diet of no more than six hundred calories a day: an
orange and black coffee for breakfast, a half head of lettuce and light dressing for lunch,
and a dinner of boiled or broiled meat or fish with vegetables. Very few people could
sustain such a regimen, but Fannie was built without a reverse gear. She moved only
forward. Her schooling, like her childhood home, was unremarkable for a woman of her
class and time. It included English (at which she excelled), history, and French and a
smattering of math and chemistry (at which she did not excel). Extracurricular activities
included the usual activities that aspiring middleclass parents hoped would elevate their
daughters: piano lessons, dancing, and tennis. Like most young girls, Fannie kept detailed
diaries, complete with illustrations. And, like many a girl reader born to a house
without books, she haunted the public library. Her parents let her read whatever she
wanted. She devoured novels, gobbling up fiction well above her years. Looking back,
she said that she had always been a “word lapidary” in love with the “colors” of words.
From early on, she had determined to be a writer of note. She practised with poems and
stories, her own school assignments, and even the school assignments of her classmates.
Relatives, neighbors, and teachers obligingly regarded her as a “decidedly outstanding”
young woman with remarkable self possession. She needed her classmates to “regard
me as the most interesting girl in the school. I wanted to share me . . . to exhibit me.”
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Hurst’s signature literary style was a blend of sentimental realism and progressive social
commentary. Dismissed by some critics as mawkish, overwrought, and labored, her
stories were so popular that at the height of her career, they regularly garnered $5,000
and her films anywhere from $35,000 to $100,000, equivalent to more than $50,000 per
story and up to $1 million per novel, with film rights, in today’s currency. Hurst’s
greatest talent may have been what her biographer Brooke Kroeger called her “talent for
success.” Once she visualized herself as a writer, her self confidence never wavered.
After graduating from Washington University in 1909, she left St. Louis and moved to
New York City, against the objections of her parents, and shared an apartment with a
girlfriend, to launch her writing career. “Even then nothing was allowed to disturb her
during hours she set aside for work, and she worked seven or eight hours a day,” the
roommate remembered. She composed on a typewriter at breakneck speed and “never
rewrote.” When editors asked for revisions, she refused. In a matter of months, however,
she was setting her own terms. Nor did she mind when her willfulness became
legendary. She happily divulged all the details of her writing process, sharing any
information that interviewers cared to ask about. Ultimately, she refused even to alter her
writing or touring schedule to respond to her parents’ deaths. Both “highly
selfconscious” and “high handed,” she could not imagine that others might not find her
single mindedness attractive. She had been born, she once admitted, a “pig for success,”
competing even with her dead sister for approval and attention. Fortunately, Hurst had
appealing qualities as well: adventurousness, bursts of generosity, a wicked sense of
humor, bluntness, and a deep sense of fair play and justice. In most cases she faced her
own weaknesses squarely. She could be very charming. Being seen as ethnic did not suit
her. In childhood, she followed her family’s suit and ignored being Jewish. “I would have
given anything,” she reported in her autobiography, not to be acknowledged as Jewish.
In New York, however, she discovered that there was an audience for ethnicity and that
being Jewish could be an advantage, a source of colorful stories about immigrant lives.
She loved to visit the “sweatshops and tenements of the Lower East Side” to gather
background for her portraits of “shopgirls, immigrants, mistresses, and romantic and
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aspiring dreamers.” She took her notepad into night court to collect stories and also took
a series of shortterm jobs at a settlement house, as a waitress, in a sweatshop, as a
salesgirl at R. H. Macy, and as a factory worker in the interest of gathering material.
Heavily plotted and some times melodramatic, her work depicted socially marginalized
characters struggling against stiff odds. Often, in stories that ranged from
Sob Sister
to
Back Street
, she wrote of women trying desperately to follow the social script
of femininity but winding up abandoned and impoverished. Readers identified with
Hurst’s fury over social double standards. Critics were not as impressed. Fannie saw few
role models for combining domestic and professional goals. So in 1915, she secretly
married pianist Jacques Danielson, maintaining her own name and a separate
residence—dating her own husband, in effect— in order to keep their relationship
“fresh” (and later to help her manage her multiyear affair with the Arctic explorer
Vilhjalmur Stefansson). The arrangement also accommodated her writing schedule, as
she typically wrote in the morning and then went out in the afternoons and evenings.
When the secret got out in 1920, with a frontpage
New York Times
story, Hurst made
use of that also. Seizing the limelight she had been given, she inveighed against the
“antediluvian custom” of sexism and double standards. She was delighted when the press
coined the phrase “a Fannie Hurst marriage” for any unconventional domestic
arrangement. She was involved in progressive social causes, including public health,
labor, sex education, reproductive rights, marriage reform, and feminism from the early
1900s on. After 1920, she was able to parlay her double celebrity—as writer and
rebel—into a career almost as notable for public speaking as it was for popular writing.
She was thus in constant demand for writing assignments, radio commentary, lectures,
and magazine pieces. The exposure ensured a constant stream of press notices—focused
as much on her hats, clothing, and weight as anything else—all of which she pasted into
scrapbooks. As her success solidified and her marriage settled down, she became even
more interested in the kinds of social issues her family had always ignored. She was a
member of the Heterodoxy Club, which brought her into the sphere of feminists such as
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Crystal Eastman, Janet Flanner, and Susan Glaspell. With
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them, she signed the Lucy Stone League’s charter protest against married women having
to take their husband’s names. She marched for suffrage with her friend Annie Nathan
Meyer’s sister Maud Nathan, among others, and was delighted to accept the Suffrage
League’s invitation to lecture on polygamy and marriage, in spite of knowing little about
the latter and nothing at all about the former. More than anything else, Hurst thrilled to
her growing reputation as one of the country’s most important “friends of the Negro,” a
public stance even more outré than feminism. In fact, Fannie Hurst came relatively late
to the cause. It was not until the mid1920s, having first gone to Harlem with Carl Van
Vechten, that she began to take a serious interest in what she called “black matters.”
Although she acted as a judge for a number of Harlem’s important literary contests, into
the mid1920s she was still dismissing the importance of race as “something I don’t
particularly think about one way or the other.” She did, however, as she remarked in one
interview, think that some blacks were “lovable characters.” In 1926, she joined the
board of the National Health Circle for Colored People (NHCCP). The NHCCP partnered
with nurses’ organizations to push for more public health services for blacks, especially
in the South, and “to create and stimulate among the colored people, health
consciousness and responsibility for their own health problems.” Like so many whiteled
social welfare organizations at the time, it took for granted that blacks needed white
instruc tion in hygiene and personal responsibility, rather than equitably distributed
social resources. In 1927, she lent her name to the organization’s fundraising appeal,
urging donors to give generously to a “languid . . . happy friendly race.” In 1928, she
composed the NHCPP’s Christmas Appeal letter. “The Southern Negro,” she wrote,
“knows pitifully little about keeping his body or his child’s body a fit place to dwell.”
Among the organization’s donors was Cornelia Chapin, acting on Charlotte Osgood
Mason’s behalf. After 1928, Hurst’s name increasingly appeared on the board lists of
organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League. Her involvement was largely
nominal, however. Impatient with the routine work of political organizing and the
tedium and anonymity of grassroots work, she preferred judging literary contests, giving
talks, penning appeals, and mentoring individuals: tasks that made use of her name and
9
reputation. She rarely attended the board meetings for which she lent her large apartment.
Instead, she left instructions with her staff. Her caveat for organizational participation
was that fellow members accept “that I was not in a position, owing to countless
obligations, . . . to give either time or money.” It is hard to imagine that the apartment
she lent was a particularly congenial place for committee meetings. It had fortyfoot
ceilings, dark woods, oversize medieval art (Catholic Madonnas and crosses), red bro
cade curtains, calla lilies (Hurst’s signature flower), and numerous portraits of herself; it
was a stylized shrine to a highly constructed image, as much a stage It was into that space
and that image that Hurst tried to shoehorn Zora Neale Hurston, another outsize
personality with a carefully constructed image to maintain. Hurston caught Hurst’s
attention at the dinner for the 1926
Opportunity
awards, which Hurst judged. Throwing a
red scarf around her shoulders and yelling out the title of her awardwinning play,
Color
Struck
, Hurston was clearly the most flamboyant person in the room. Hurst was unused
to such competition, and it is to her credit that she gravitated toward the woman who
upstaged her. Fannie Hurst was by then the highestpaid writer in the United States, with
many novels and hundreds of stories already in print. She was also probably the most
influential and widely known white person to interest herself in black New York.
Hurston, by contrast, was a recent arrival to New York, struggling to make ends meet.
She had appealed for support to both Arthur A. Schomburg and the hairdressing
entrepreneur Annie Pope Malone (the Madam C. J. Walker of the Midwest) but both had
turned her down. Annie Nathan Meyer had already taken an interest in helping her get
into Barnard but lacked sufficient funds to cover all of Hurston’s expenses; she en
couraged her friend Fannie Hurst to help out as well. Knowing Hurst proved an
enormous advantage to Hurston, then Barnard’s only black student. “Your friendship
was a tremendous help to me at a critical time. It made both faculty and students
see
me
when I needed seeing,” Hurston wrote to her. Hurston suddenly had two very
wellknown Jewish women friends, both of them wellestablished writers. “I love it! . . .
To actually talk and eat with some of the big names that you have admired at a
distance,” Hurston told a friend. Her unabashed delight contributed to Hurst’s ongoing
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selfcrafting. So Hurst helped out enthusiastically, enlarging Hurston’s social contacts,
introducing her to Stefansson, writer Irvin Cobb, Paramount Pictures cofounder Jesse
Lasky, actress Margaret Anglin, and others. It was timely assistance, since Hurston was
down to her last “11 cents.” And Barnard, which catered to upperclass women, was
requiring her to pay for a gym outfit, a bathing suit, a golf outfit, and a tennis racket. Far
worse, some of her Barnard professors were assigning “C” grades to her examinations
before she had even sat for them. She was feeling, she said, like a “Negro Extra.” Hurst
was entranced with Hurston. She believed she saw an essential, primitive blackness in
her. “She sang with the plangency and tears of her people and then on with equal
lustiness to hipshuddering and fingersnapping jazz,” Hurst wrote approvingly. She was
as “uninhibited as a child.” To Hurst, Hurston was a humble native genius, close to the
soil, a delightful “girl” with the “strong racial characteristics” of humor, humility, and
wit. She saw in Hurston a “sophisticated negro mind that has retained many
characteristics of the oldfashion and humble type.” She praised her “talent,” her
“individuality.” Mostly, she delighted in what she called Hurston’s “most refreshing
unself consciousness of race.” Hurst hired Hurston as a chauffeur and personal
secretary—“the world’s worst secretary.” Hurston was to run errands and answer letters
and the telephone. “Her shorthand was short on legibility, her typing hitormiss, mostly
the latter, her filing, a game of findthethimble. Her mind ran ahead of my thoughts and
she would interject with an impatient suggestion or clarification of what I wanted to say.
If dictation bored her, she would interrupt, stretch wide her arms and yawn: ‘Let’s get
out the car, I’ll drive you up to the Harlem badlands or down to the wharves where men
go down to the sea in ships.’” Fortunately, Hurst loved to visit outoftheway places
and Hurston loved to drive. Invariably, Hurst took the backseat. On one of their driving
trips, Hurston took Hurst to see her hometown, Eatonville, Florida Eatonville was the
nation’s first incorporated black town, Hurston’s folklore source, and her emotional
touchstone. To her it was a utopian world where blacks lived near whites “without a
single instance of enmity”; where people lived a “simple” life of “open kindnesses, anger,
hate, love, and envy”; where you “got what your strengths could bring you.” But Hurst
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saw “squalor” instead of the splendor dear to Hurston’s heart. She looked pityingly on
what Hurston claimed as the “deserted home” of Hurston’s family, “a dilapidated
tworoom shack.” The building, in fact, had never housed the family. But Hurst never
found out that Hurston had never lived in such a shack. On the contrary, the family home
in Eatonville was a gracious eightroom property on five acres, a “roomy house” on a
nice “piece of ground with two big Chinaberry trees shading the front gate and Cape
jasmine bushes with hundreds of blooms on either side of the walks . . . plenty of orange,
grapefruit, tangerine, guavas and other fruits” in the yard. Hurston clearly understood,
and provided, what Hurst expected to see. Hurst was at a difficult point in her career.
Commercially successful almost beyond imagining, she was nevertheless becoming
increasingly discontent. She longed, as she put it, to be a “darling of the critics,” but she
was becoming their whipping girl instead. In fact, she had become their model of “how
not to write.” Hurst had no talent for breaking her own patterns. But now she needed a
drastic alteration of her own formula, a book that others would see as entirely new and
different. It was on one of their car trips, just at this juncture, in June 1931, that
Hurston—who was also collaborating with Annie Nathan Meyer and under inreasing
pressure from Charlotte Osgood Mason—furnished Hurst with the material for
Imitation
of Life.
Hurst told Hurston that they were motoring toward Vermont to look at property
and visit her literary agent, Elisabeth Marbury, who had just taken Hurston on board as
well. Marbury was a power house, and Hurston would naturally have been eager to
solidify the new relationship with a social visit. Hurston’s contract with Mason had ended
that March, freeing up her publication plans but also leaving her without the regular
financial support she had grown accustomed to. She had two manuscripts under revision
but no acceptances and Franz Boas looking over one shoulder, Mason glaring over the
other. With fewer and fewer outlets for black literature available after the stock market
crash, good relations with both Hurst and Marbury could make all the difference. But
Fannie Hurst had her own agenda. She had been making secret plans to leave her husband
for Stefansson. Hurston provided cover. As they drove north, Hurst suddenly pressured
her to drive into Canada, where Stefansson was lecturing; she promised to show Hurston
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Niagara Falls. Hurst and Stefansson eventually scuttled their plans, and Hurst remained
in her marriage to Danielson. But the trip to Canada was not a loss for her. All along the
way,
Imitation of Life
took shape in lengthy conversations in the car. Hurston had
always been fascinated with the inner lives of working women, Hurst’s favorite subject.
Mapping out the interior life of Hurst’s new characters came naturally to Hurston. In her
rear seat, Hurst scribbled hurriedly in a small notebook. At night, alone in her hotel room
(Hurston stayed in rooming houses that accepted blacks or else she slept in the car), Hurst
added to her notes. Hurst returned to New York with the core of the novel that would
ensure her legacy for decades to come. Hurston, on the other hand, returned to New
York to find that Mason and Locke were furious with her and banishing her to the
South.
Imitation of Life
was an important experiment for Hurst, designed to prove to the
modernists who ignored her and the critics who derided her that sentimentality, a deeply
female literary form, could
address the “hard” social isues. She had a lot riding on the
novel. But she needed Hurston’s help. She wrote a series of letters, begging Hurston to
return to New York and review her draft. Hurston was in Florida working hard on her
folk opera and trying to keep that fact from Mason, who wanted her to work on
Barracoon.
Hurst desperately wanted her advice on the manuscript, but Hurston dodged
her, sick of being anyone’s “pet Negro.” Hurst finished the novel, her only black story,
on her own. It shows. Set just beyond the bustling Atlantic City boardwalk,
Imitation of
Life
tells two unhappy stories of passing: white Bea Pullman (née Chipley)’s brief
passing for a man and black Peola Johnson’s lifelong passing for white. Bea’s passing
costs her dearly, but it is excused because of the disadvantages imposed on women in a
world of sexual double standards, a frequent theme of Hurst’s. But Peola’s passing,
although occasioned by a similar desire to escape the racial double standard, is neither
excused nor forgiven in the novel. Peola’s unhappiness is depicted as her own fault, the
consequence of her sinful efforts to pass. Bea grows up in a claustrophobic, middleclass
household not unlike Hurst’s own. She lives close enough to hear but not see the
exciting Atlantic City boardwalk, a nonetoosubtle symbol of bourgeois restraints on
women. The Chipleys’ world consists of “monotonous . . . minutiae of detail . . .
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automatic processes of locomotion and eating and sleeping” stuffed into a “little
household . . . all cluttered like that, with littleness.” Mrs. Chipley’s early death obliges
Bea to begin looking after her “exacting” father and the family’s board er, Benjamin
Pullman. The men of the household, father and boarder, decide that Bea should marry
Pullman, an unattractive, older pickle and maple syrup salesman. Bea re solves on going
through with the sweetandsour marriage for the sake of “security!” and enters into a
loveless union in which sex is “a clinical sort of something, apparently, that a girl had to
give a man.” That “let down” is followed, in quick succession, by pregnancy, with its
“perfectly terrible spells of morning nausea”; her father’s debilitating stroke; her
husband’s sudden death in a train wreck; and the premature birth of her daughter, Jessie.
To try to keep her family afloat, Bea uses her dead husband’s “B. Pullman” business
cards and passes for a businessman. As “B. Pullman,” she does well, even better than her
late husband. But it is not enough. She must be father, mother, and daughter, must
“report back, every hour or less, to the house on Arctic Avenue that contained her father
and child.” So she drifts “across the railroad tracks to the shanty district” to wander
among the “what nots” who do domestic work and find domestic help. There she
encounters Delilah, “the enormously buxom figure of a woman with a round black moon
face that shone above an Alps of a bosom” and hires her on the spot. Delilah brings
along her “threemontholdchile” Peola, an infant as lightcolored as Delilah is dark:
“the purfectest white nigger baby dat God ever dropped down in de lap of a black
woman from Virginie,” as Delilah describes her. Once established as a force of order in
Bea Pullman’s kitchen, presiding “like a vast black sun over the troubled waters of the
domestic scene,” Delilah, the wondrous “what not,” can turn to ensuring the success of
Bea’s growing waffle house and coffee shop business. Bea’s “walkin’ trademark,”
Delilah lets Bea market her as a “mammy to the world,” selling southern nostalgia to
ener vated northern city dwellers. Embodying the qualities of nurture and care that
made whites such as southern writer Julia Peterkin label the “Mammy” a “credit” to her
black race, Delilah helps Bea create a “rest cure” of comfort tucked into American
modernity. Hurst’s “mammy,” finished without the ben efit of Hurston’s keen eye, is a
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figure indistinguishable from the one that the Daughters of the Confederacy had hoped to
honor, in 1923, in Atlanta, an image of the comfort and care sought by anxious whites,
afraid of change. Black journalist Chandler Owen, among others, argued that it was high
time for the nation to “let go” of its love of black mammies. “Let it fade away,”
Chandler wrote. “Let it be buried. . . . We favor erecting a monument to the New
Negro.” But Hurst, writing ten years later, did not “let go.” On the contrary, she used the
“Old Negro” to create a memorable New Woman. Before long, thanks to Delilah, the
thoroughly modern Bea is (like Hurst) wildly successful. But she has only an “imitation
of life,” since she rules over a business rather than a home. Being a New Woman,
apparently, has its draw backs. Female happiness has “passed her by, all right, without
leaving her the leisure to more than fleetingly comprehend it.” She has “built a colossus,
when all she had ever wanted was a homelife behind Swiss curtains of her own hem
ming, with a man.” But because she is that “comparatively rare bird, woman in big
business,” she is stuck with the “success of her success.” Delilah tries to save the modern
woman from herself. She urges Bea to get herself some “man lovin’” before it’s too late.
Delilah’s insistence on Bea’s right to sexual satisfaction is the novel’s strongest feminist
statement, but because Hurst puts it largely in Delilah’s voice, it does not get very far.
Bea is never quite sure what she wants. And Delilah is preoccupied with her daughter,
who’s grown from a sulky, selfpitying toddler into a dissembler and liar, passing for
white to win popularity and approval. Delilah is as horrified as if she’d never heard of
passing. “Dar ain’t no passing,” she insists, “ain’t no way to dye black white. . . . Black
wimmin who pass, pass into damnation.” Delilah contends that Peola’s sin is rooted in
her birth, coursing through the “blue white blood” she inherited from her “pap.” That
blood, Delilah maintains, like “wild white horses” in her veins, has doomed her
daughter. Endorsing rather than challenging Delilah’s view, the novel ensures that
Peola’s transgressions meet with misery. Blacks cannot and must not impersonate
whites, the novel’s narrative logic insists. That narrative logic may have been a more
serious betrayal of Hurst’s Harlem friendships than even her depiction of Delilah. The
nonsense of “blood talk” was precisely what so much Harlem Renaissance literature de
15
voted itself to exposing. James Weldon Johnson’s 1917
Autobiography of an Ex–
Colored Man
showed the ease with which blacks could learn codes of white behavior.
George Schuyler’s 1925
Black No More
showed how ridiculous soci ety would become
if “blood talk” was taken to the logical extremes of its hys terical fractional categories.
Delilah’s belief that blood would inevitably “out” in surefire racial telltales such as a
bluish tinge to the fingernails was parodied as so much “silly rot” in Nella Larsen’s 1929
Passing
, which Van Vechten would certainly have pressed upon Hurst. The Rhinelander
case was one example of the horrors of taking such “nonsense” seriously and the
Scottsboro case was another. But Hurst’s Delilah, modeled so obviously on Aunt
Jemima, is an Old Negro, and an insistence on oldfashioned, outworn white ideas of
blackness. She is a minstrel figure with an “easilyhinged large mouth, packed with the
white laughter of her stunning allotment of houndclean teeth; the jug color of her skin
. . . the terrific unassailable quality of her high spirits,” and with mala propisms, and
mispronunciations. She is subservient and “unctuous,” always ready to soothe Bea’s
daughter with her “black crocodilelike hand.” She wants nothing but resignation for her
daughter: “Make her contented wid her lot,” she moans. Peola recoils from her mother.
And, given what Hurst has made her, it is easy to see why: “The wide expanse of her
face slashingly wet, the whites of her eyes seeming to pour rivulets down her face like
rain against a window pane, her splayed lips dripping eaves of more tears,” Delilah is
de scribed. Delilah dies on the floor, kissing her mistress’s ankles. Delilah,
Sterling Brown noted with disgust, “is straight out of Southern fiction. . . . Resignation to
injustice is her creed.” She is, he went on to point out, “now infantile, now mature, now
cataloguing folkbeliefs of the Southern Negro, and now cracking contemporary
witticisms.” White readers loved the novel. “Of course they had reasons,” Brown noted
drily. Even for a community habitually polite to its white supporters—“We are a polite
people,” Hurston always said—Delilah was too much. All the more so because she was
popular with whites. “I have heard dialect all my life, but I have yet to hear such a line as
‘She am an angel,’” Sterling Brown noted. She is the “old stereotype of the contented
Mammy, and the tragic mulatto; and the ancient ideas about the mixture of the races.”
16
Langston Hughes was friends with Hurst. But he could not hold back. He made an
example of Hurst’s novel in his
Limitations of Life
, one of four satiric skits he wrote for
the Harlem Suitcase Theatre lampooning white imitations of blacks. Reversing the racial
roles and using variations of the names of the lead actresses in Stahl’s 1934 blockbuster
movie made from the novel, Hughes had blond Audette rub Mammy Weavers’s feet,
promise never to leave her, and gaze at her mistress “like a faithful dog”: “I
never
gets
tired doin’ for you,” Au dette intoned. Hurst’s use of the passing story, so central to
Harlem Renaissance thinking about identity, was viewed as the trespass that Carl Van
Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven
, Libby Holman’s blackface “Moanin’ Low,” and even most of
the white plays about black life were not. Objecting to Hurst’s novel, “the ‘passing’
episodes are . . . unbelievable. . . . [Peola] never quite gets a grasp of the whole prob
lem,” Brown wrote. Hurst thought Brown should have been more grateful for the
attention she gave to blacks. “I cannot imagine what in the world I have to be grateful
for,” Brown replied. Racial passing was serious business in the 1920s and 1930s, when
main stream newspapers, taking for granted that it was unethical, advised white readers
about how to detect black blood. In the public imagination, the passer was a moral
criminal, trying to impersonate what she or she was not and, at the same time, betraying
his or her true nature. But in the hands of black writ ers such as Charles Chesnutt, James
Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Jessie
Fauset, and Nella Larsen, passing was a moral victory. For them, the moral force of
passing indicted society’s unfair lines, not the passer who crossed them. For Harlemites,
“there was no story more compelling than the story of a black person who passes for
white.” Indeed, the passing story provided an occasion in black fiction for whites to be
comically portrayed—they are either duped by passers or panicked needlessly about
them—and for blacks to be he roes. A victim of racism, the passer is
forced
across the
color line, in black fic tion, by discrimination and prejudice, which his or her passing
reveals. Black fiction also used passing to question the idea that race is a biological
essence or identity in the blood. As Paul Gilroy put it, passing puts “rooted identity . . .
that most precious commodity . . . in grave jeopardy.” Hurst’s narrative logic, however,
17
got every piece of that crucial political for mula wrong. She punished Peola for what
society had done to her. She failed to treat Peola’s passing as a reasonable response to
prejudice, let alone an act of valor. She made Peola a villain, rather than a victim,
charging her with the re sponsibility for her mother’s collapse. Nor did Hurst
understand the genre’s “moment of regret” that always turned society’s preference for
whiteness upside down. Hurst’s Peola prefers white society. She experiences no longing
for blackness, no wish for a return, none of the “wild desire” to go home that drives
Nella Larsen’s passing character almost to madness. Peola never looks back, never
misses blackness, never finds a single thing from her black life for which she longs or
even feels nostalgic. A cruel daughter who breaks her mother’s heart, Peola is pure
perpetrator. Peola’s lack of feeling for blackness betrays her author’s attitudes. Though
known for her sentimental writing, Hurst was remarkably unsentimental. She saw no
particular value to racial identity unless it provided story material. Be cause the story of
passing is, at its core, a tale of racial longing (for the black identity left behind), Hurst’s
story falls flat.
Imitation of Life
cannot imagine racial longing. In place of a black erotics
of identity, it shores up Delilah’s old fashioned view that we must be as “Lordagawd”
made us. A lifelong self fashioner, Hurst drew the line at black selfcreation, perhaps
because she could not imagine racial longing of any type. Her novel was a special disap
pointment to a community deeply invested in the rich emotional potential of racial
identity and deeply invested, as well, in expectations of its Negrotarians.
Many Harlemites joined the fracas over
Imitation of Life
in 1933 and 1934 when the first
film version of the novel appeared. But Hurston kept her peace. Although she supported
Hurst in private letters, she refrained from saying a word in public. Hurston must have
seen, and perhaps hoped that others would not notice, that Delilah was only half Aunt
Jemima. Hurst’s Delilah was also half Hurston, or rather half what Hurst
perceived
to be
Hurston’s racial nature. She was painfully aware of the traits Hurst prized in her:
“childlike manner . . . no great profundities but dancing perceptions . . . sense of humor,”
and de lightful “fund of folklore.” The lack of “indignation” and “insensibility” to
racial slights, which Hurst imagined she saw in Hurston, were precisely the materials
18
out of which Delilah was created. She was a “margarine Negro,” as Hurston called
whiteauthored black caricatures, a figure built in Hurst’s image of Hurston, an insult at
every level and, perhaps, Hurst’s retaliation for Hurston’s refusal to help. Yet, Hurst
evidently did not expect a black backlash. She was “stunned when she found her
bestselling novel
Imitation of Life
the subject of fierce de bate and parody” and
“horrified by the sharp criticism” in
Opportunity.
Her novel probably had a profound
effect on how the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance viewed friendship with
whites and the possibilities of interracial intimacy. But there were few, if any, other
direct consequences for Hurst, insu lated by her own status, to face. She continued to
count both Hughes and Hurston as lifelong friends, staying in touch with Hurston well
into the 1940s, though it would always be Hurston’s “Dear Miss Hurst” to Hurst’s
“Dear Zora.” She continued to be invited onto the advisory boards of black organi
zations. She remained a regular attendee of Harlem’s storied interracial parties, cabarets,
and literary salons. To her great delight, she was promoted to na tional spokesperson for
race, credited with having an inside view of blacks. Such venerable publications as
The
New York Times
asked her to tell readers all about “the other, and unknown, Harlem,”
handing her a podium that some whites, such as Nancy Cunard, in her essay “Harlem
Reviewed,” would have to struggle to construct. Nothing that followed the novel forced
Hurst to take re sponsibility for its racial slights. Just after
Imitation of Life
appeared,
Hurston wrote an essay entitled “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” perhaps her most
forceful statement about how
much white writers get wrong when they try to write about blacks. Their writ ings, she
argued, “made out they were holding a lookingglass to the Negro [but] had everything
in them except Negroness.” Without naming Hurst, Hurston’s essay addressed every
flaw of Hurst’s novel, from its minstrel ridden use of dialect and malapropisms to its
treatment of Peola. “If a villain is needed” in a white novel, Hurston noted, white writers
just “go catch a mulatto . . . yaller niggers being all and always wrong.” Those
“margarine Negroes,” Hurston went on, are found especially in “popular magazines”:
Fannie Hurst’s primary outlet. Hurston listed the white writers she called “earnest
19
seekers”: DuBose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, T. S. Stribling, and Paul Green. Fannie
Hurst was not included. It was high time, Hurston argued, for white writers to
earn
the
privilege of writing about blacks. “Go hard or go home,” she concluded an grily.
Intended for
The American Mercury
, the essay was pulled at the last minute and never
published. Possibly, Hurst never saw it. Hurston tried again, and Hurst certainly saw
Hurston’s essay “The Pet Negro System,” published in 1943. Written as a mock sermon,
the essay takes a mock document called
The Book of Dixie
as its text: And every white
man shall be allowed to pet himself a Negro. Yea, he shall take a black man unto himself
to pet and to cherish and this same Negro shall be perfect in his sight. Nor shall hatred
among the races of men, nor conditions of strife in the walled cities, cause his pride and
pleasure in his own Negro to wane. The “Pet Negro,” Hurston explained, “is someone
whom a particular white person or persons wants to have and to do all the things
forbidden to other Negroes”; by pointing to his or her pet, the white person decries
outside crit icism. Even if she’s a troublemaker and difficult—as pets often are talking
back to him and refusing to do all he asks, he’s only too happy to heap rewards on her,
privileges foreclosed to all other blacks. Again, Hurston did not name Fannie Hurst. She
did not need to. All of Harlem had known of her friendship with Hurst. And Hurst
certainly would have been familiar with Hurston’s masterpiece,
Their Eyes Were
Watching God
, published in 1937, with its suggestion that trying to speak across the
racial divide, or develop any meaningful friendships with whites, is as much a waste of
time as “letting the moon shine” down your throat. Hurst’s repeated insistence on
“unselfconsciousness” about race applied only to blacks. She did not believe it did—or
should—apply to her. Her de mand for “color blindness” was a oneway street, what
Patricia Williams calls a “false luxury” that pretends that what matters a great deal does
not matter at all.
Feeling
little for either whiteness or blackness, Hurst allowed herself to
be intellectually fascinated with blackness while whiteness went unexamined.
That
kind
of unselfconsciousness about race is fundamental to what George Lipsitz calls the
“possessive investment in whiteness”: the privilege of not seeing one self, if white, as
raced, and the idea that one’s own whiteness is a neutral de fault, nothing more than the
20
way things are. Music and literary critic Baz Dreisinger, one of the few academics to
write about “reverse” racial passing, suggests that we can differentiate “admirable” white
identifications with black ness from “onerous” ones by the presence or absence of a
selfcritical distance. Hurst’s own background might have given her the distance
Dreisinger describes. As a Jew, she was not considered entirely white. The closer she
came to blackness, however, the whiter she became. Had she taken more note of that
phenomenon, as well as taking professional advantage of it, her story of identities
crossed and recrossed would have been richer. Whereas Lillian Wood, Josephine
Cogdell Schuyler, Annie Nathan Meyer, and Charlotte Osgood Mason all confounded
available ideas of race and identity, whether meaning to or not, Fannie Hurst, by and
large, affirmed the status quo. The fact that Hurst could so easily avoid any
consequences for that failure makes what other white women—from Lillian Wood to
Nancy Cunard— willingly incurred for their transgressions all the more remarkable.
Hurst’s failure of even her own liberal ideals serves as a painful reminder of how
unpredictable—even to herself—Miss Anne’s involvement could be.
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