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Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 360 UTAh hISTOrICAL QUArTErLy color will be accepted. However, the city offers her nothing but disenchantment. She begins emulating the looks and behaviors of fairerskinned people around her until she realizes that her light-skinned lover is homosexual, a moment that awakens Emma Lou to her own hypocrisy.77 Although critics praised Thurman for devoting a novel to the plight of a dark-skinned girl, they faulted him for being too objective, claiming he recounted Emma Lou’s life without handing down any judgment on the world in which she lived. Other critics insisted that Thurman “was working out his own feelings of self-hatred, his personal experiences with discrimination both inside and outside the race; the locales almost force the reader to see the novel as autobiography.”78 Thurman Forsythe, Thurman’s longtime friend, wrote in his 1929 review that the novel “is cold, unpoetic, unemotional, unmusical, unrhythmic but keenly analytical, fearless and honest.”79 While older readings of the novel found a correlation between the dark-skinned Thurman and his protagonist, Emma Lou, more recently, critics have not supported the argument that Blacker was a thinly veiled autobiography. In spite of Thurman’s dark skin and the insults he might have endured because of his complexion, for him, intra-cultural conflict (at least in his published work) had more to do with the tensions between blacks born in and outside of the United States than anything else. Foreignborn blacks migrated to Harlem in droves after World War I and, as Thurman argued, “the American Negro looks down upon these foreigners just as the white American looks down upon the white immigrants from Europe.”80 He further explained, It is the Negro from the British West Indies who creates and has to face a disagreeable problem. . . . He is frowned upon and berated by the American Negro. This intra-racial prejudice is an amazing though natural thing. Imagine a community of people. . . universally known as oppressed, wasting time and energy trying to oppress others of their kind, more recently transplanted from a foreign clime. It is easy to explain. All people seem subject to prejudice, even those who suffer from it the most.81 Color and wealth, Thurman argued, were part of a larger spectrum of racial and territorial division in America and in Harlem. Meanwhile, as Daniel Scott contends, Blacker was not “a reflection of Thurman’s anxiety over his own dark skin,” but “a text that deliberately . . . [explores] identity categories as staged in Harlem, the ‘city of surprises.’”82 77 Until recently, when gay and lesbian studies made same-sex orientation and love legitimate topics of discussion in the media and academy, few, if any, critics addressed Thurman’s bold reference to homosexuality through the implied relationship between Emma Lou’s lover, Alva, and his male friend. Scholars and critics now discuss this lifestyle as a central, though often indirect and silent, theme of the Harlem Renaissance. 78 Klotman, “Wallace Henry Thurman,” 269. 79 Thurman Forsythe, “Review of The Blacker the Berry, by Wallace Thurman,” Flash (June 29, 1929): 1. 80 Thurman, “Few Know Real Harlem,” in Singh and Scott, Collected Writings, 67. 81 Thurman, “Negro Life in New York’s Harlem,” in Singh and Scott, Collected Writings, 44, emphasis added. 82 Daniel M. Scott III, “Harlem Shadows: Re-Evaluating Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry,” MELUS 29, no. 3/4 (2004): 323–39. 360 |
