Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [17]
And as Locke observed, the very suffering endured through the centuries by black men and women torn from their homeland and living in slavery had given the black artist a unique tragic vision. “Out of the depths of his group and personal experience, [the Negro artist] has to his hand almost the conditions of a classical art.” Ironically, though, white writers like Eugene O’Neill and Sherwood Anderson were better able to use this motif of the black man as the representative of universal suffering than black writers who were determined not to portray themselves as victims.
Instead these artists sought out a distinctive “Negro” culture of which they could be proud—freeing themselves from the tyranny of white, Western ideals of beauty, morality and truth by searching out their own heritage in African art, folk traditions and tribal lore and building a distinguishing racial identity. As one historian of the Harlem Renaissance writes, “Without distinct Negro character, there could be no Negro genius.” Denying the differences between the races meant denying the past, thought many; it was better to seek out differences and celebrate them.
Music was one area where black artists effortlessly outshone their white counterparts on their own terms. Negro spirituals were recognized as containing not just the self-pity of a craven people, but glimpses of salvation and eternity. Du Bois, who studied them extensively, ascribed to them a mystical force which bound black people together emotionally. Spirituals were, he said, a powerful expression of their collective experiences.
Jazz, blues and popular dance music were another irresistible expression of black pride. Although white musicians tried to imitate black musicians they could not capture their elusive spirit. They “studied us so hard that you’d think they were in class,” said Alberta Hunter. “And what could we do? Only thing we could do was to do those numbers even better—which we did.”
Harlem’s first hit of the Jazz Age was 1921’s exhilarating revue Shuffle Along, which starred Florence Mills and featured a then-unknown Josephine Baker in its chorus, and attracted sellout audiences of spellbound whites. “Talk about pep!” wrote one—evidently white—reviewer. “These people make pep seem something different to the tame thing we known further downtown.” Despite its success with whites, what marked out Shuffle Along was that it was written, produced and performed, in Harlem, by black people: for the first time they were creating their own image, rather than reflecting a white view of them.
But the frivolity and indeed the very popularity of shows like Shuffle Along made some black intellectuals dismiss the new music as irrelevant to their cause. When the poet Claude McKay reviewed Shuffle Along for The Liberator magazine he made a point of praising its all-black production because some black radicals “were always hard on Negro comedy . . . hating to see themselves as a clowning race.” At best they viewed it as folk art, at worst as something whose sensuality and exuberance demeaned blacks and trapped them in unwelcome stereotypes. High art and literature would unite the races and prove that all were equal, not energetic dances with silly names or mournful songs about lost love.
But a few pioneers did recognize the importance of jazz. “Originally the nobody’s child of the levée and the city slum,” wrote J. A. Rogers in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology, The New Negro, jazz was becoming, alongside the dollar and the movie, a symbol of “modern Americanism,” and the only difficulty lay in determining whether it was “more characteristic of the Negro or of contemporary America” as a whole.
If spirituals and the blues represented the tragedy of