"Moanin' Wid A Sword In Ma Han'"

A Discussion of the Negro's Reluctance to Develop and Exploit his Racial Gifts

CARL VAN VECHTEN

ECENTLY I attended a song recital given by a Negro baritone. The program announced that he would sing songs in six languages, and I believe that he actually did so, but his enunciation was so imperfect that it was difficult enough to catch the words even when he sang in English. That he was the possessor of a beautiful voice and at least a superficial knowledge of the essential style of some of the music he delivered there was no gainsaying, although, ironically.enough, this knowledge of style completely deserted him when he attempted a group of Negro Spirituals.

On the whole the concert left me cold, as, I am forced to conclude by their lack of enthusiasm, it left the remainder of the sparse audience cold. There was, to be sure, perfunctory applause, but we, who sat in the orchestra chairs, were not moved to make any excessive demonstration of spontaneous appreciation. The fact is, that the singer was no better and no worse than a dozen other singers who are patiently listened to by their friends and a few apathetic critics every month during the season.

After the concert I went home, drew on a dressing-gown and a pair of comfortable slippers, and sat down to meditate. Theoretically, there appeared to be no reason why a Negro should refrain from offering a conventional recital program. Roland Hayes has made a successful specialty of such a program. But, reflection informed me, Roland Hayes is the exception. He is not only an unusually gifted artist, but he was the first Negro to attempt such a program before a wide audience. He is therefore something of a novelty.

To be frank, however, most of us are tired of song recitals. Several years ago, indeed, I wrote a paper called Corditefor Concerts, in which I figuratively blew them up. Any impresario can tell you that ninety per cent, of the song recitals that are given in New York today are given at a loss to the performer before an audience of deadheads. No one, as a matter of fact, who proffers a conventional, classic program, save an exceptional genius, a Chaliapin, a Roland Hayes, can fill a hall today without punching holes in the tickets.

Curiously enough, did he but seize it, the opportunity lies in the hands of the Negro to wrest a conspicuous success out of this general apathy. It is sufficient cause for amazement, under the circumstances, that he has been so tardy in doing so. Within the past few years the fame of Negro folk-music, long relished by the few, has spread around the world. The Negro Spirituals are admired everywhere they are known; book after book devoted to them has tumbled from the presses, culminating in that superb collection, The Book of American Negro Spirituals, arranged by J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson, with some assistance from Lawrence Brown. The world is aching to hear these Spirituals authoritatively sung, authentically performed, but with rare exceptions, the Negro himself is making comparatively little effort to satisfy this longing.

The Fisk Singers, to be sure, since 1871, have regarded the dissemination of these tunes almost in the light of a sacred obligation, but it was not until May, 1925, that Paul Robeson, with the assistance of Lawrence Brown, gave what was probably the first song recital devoted entirely to Negro music, with a success that is a matter of record. Paul Robeson is a great artist. I say great advisedly, for to hear him sing Negro music is an experience allied to hearing Chaliapin sing Russian folksongs. In November, another pair of Spiritual singers gladdened the cars of New Yorkers: Taylor Gordon, whose evangelical performances of these rich and beautiful melodies, rendered in his brilliant tenor voice, with Rosamond Johnson playing his own versions of the harmonies at the piano, was received with a degree of enthusiasm that fell just short of rapture.

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Two Negro couples then are giving concerts of Negro folksongs before audiences which pack the theatres to the doors whenever they appear, but the rest of the Negro world remains silent in this respect, at least in relation to the great public. As a matter of fact, no one but Negroes, as I have often before remarked in print, can give satisfactory renderings of these songs, but that will not deter white men, who have a nose that senses demand, from making the attempt. It is a foregone conclusion that with the craving to hear these songs that is known to exist on the part of the public, it will not be long before white singers have taken them over and made them enough their own so that the public will be surfeited sooner or later with opportunities to enjoy them, and—when the Negro tardily offers to sing them in public— it will perhaps be too late to stir the interest which now lies latent in the breast of every music lover.

This is an epitome of what has happened in the case of the Negro in other directions. It is generally regarded as an incontrovertible fact that ragtime and the later jazz grew out of Negro folk-music. Many of the early songs were practically literal transcriptions of tunes and words popular on the Mississippi levees. But, as James Weldon Johnson has pointed out in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, it was not long before the white man discovered that words dealing with white people might be fitted to these infectious rhythms, and soon Irving Berlin, and later George Gershwin— to name the two most conspicuous figures in a long list—were writing better jazz than the Negro composers.

The Negro is an original and highly gifted dancer. Every small community indulges in its folkdances which every child in the community knows. The Negro's most recent addition to the joy of living is the Charleston. Where the Charleston came from, apparently nobody knows: it is comparatively safe to state that it did not come from the city in South Carolina. Whatever its origin it quickly settled in the cabarets of Harlem, spread like wildfire through the streets of that quarter—there have been times when children might be observed performing it on nearly every corner—and finally, in Runnin' Wild, captured the town. All the purveyors of white revues borrowed it, and today you cannot go to any theatre where there is dancing without seeing it. Now, as any one knows who has sat through a Negro musical show, no one else can compete with a Negro in the intricate steps and loose-jointed movements of this dance, and yet the fact remains that if you were asked to mention one coloured professional woman who was especially proficient in it, you would be unable to do so. Everybody knows that Ann Penning, ton and Adele Astaire can Charleston brilliantly, but not one woman of the Negro race has had the energy and foresight to achieve a great name for herself through a particularly telling performance, although at least two men, Eddie Rector and Bill Robinson, have added to their own glory and the glory of the Negro by their prowess in this direction.

Every professional white dancing teacher in New York is engaged in imparting this dance—or such a version of it as he has been able to acquire—but when several friends of mine asked me to find them a Negro teacher, it took me a week to dig one up, although I made assiduous inquiry.

A director of a prominent phonograph company informed me that he dared not permit his Blues singers to appear in white theatres or even to mingle with the more sophistocated members of their own race. "A few such contacts," he said, "and they won't sing Blues any more; they prefer white ballads. We've lost several excellent Blues singers this way."

Now the Negro has made no greater offering to the enjoyment of civilized mankind than the Blues. Yet I have never heard one of these songs—I am speaking of the real folk-Blues— in a white theatre or even in a Negro revue intended for white audiences. It is' almost impossible for a white man to persuade a real Blues singer to sing Blues even in a cabaret.

The Negro consistently freely delivers his best material to the white man in the matter of painting— Miguel Covarrubias and Weinold Reiss are the best known modern painters of the Negro, although I must admit that a young black man named Aaron Douglas will bear watching—and literature. There has been, in fact, a determined protest on the part of the Negro against the exploitation in fiction of his picturesque life. This distaste is largely based on the fact that white writers about the Negro have chosen to depict the squalour and vice of Negro Life rather than its intellectual and cultural aspects. This proclivity is likely, however, to be permanent, for the low-life of Negroes offers a wealth of exotic and novel material while the life of the cultured Negro does not differ in essentials from the life of the cultured white man.

Until recently, in fact, the Negro writer has made a free gift of this exceptionally good copy—one should except Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt from this indictment—to the white author. Lately, however, a new school of coloured writers, of which the best known and the most gifted are probably Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes—the talents of Countee Cullen, Walter White, and Jessie Fauset have been exercised in other directions—have perceived the advantage of writing about squalid Negro life from the inside. In the carrying out of this laudable ambition, it may be added, they have not met with much encouragement from the Negro public.

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When the white author who, reasonably enough, makes use of any good material he discovers, attempts to deal with this milieu he is more than frowned upon. In a recent issue of the Crisis, one of the most influential of Negro periodicals, I read a criticism by Emmett J. Scott, Jr., of Haldane MacFall's novel, The Wooings of Jezebel Petty fer, in which the reviewer asserted, "A book less appealing to a coloured man would be hard to find." For purposes of disparagement Mr. Scott quotes my dictum to the effect that this is "probably the best book yet written about the Negro." It is quite true that I made this recommendation, but when I made it I was thinking of Jezebel as a work of art. It is certainly written with more skill and inspiration than any other novel about the Negro that I have read. Whether or not it presents an accurate picture of Negro life in the Barbadoes I have no means of knowing: I have never been in the Barbadoes. I do know, however, that it presents a credible picture, that the characters and scenes arouse my imagination.

There exists, it would appear, an explicable tendency on the part of the Negro to be sensitive concerning all that is written about him, particularly by a white man, to regard even the fiction in which he plays a role in the light of propaganda. Mr. Scott seems to be suffering from this prevalent sensitiveness. This will probably do no hurt to a work which has been as generally admired as Jezebel, but it is an attitude of mind which may be utterly destructive when it is applied to the writings of Negroes themselves. It is the kind of thing, indeed, which might be effective in preventing many excellent coloured writers from speaking any truth which might be considered unpleasant. There are plenty of unpleasant truths to be spoken about any race. The true artist speaks out fearlessly. The critic judges the artistic result; nor should he be concerned with anything else.

I do not believe it was Mr. MacFall's intention to be unpleasant. Nevertheless, apparently because the author of Jezebel writes of "slipshod Negresses" and "slattern gossips"—the heroine of the novel is a prostitute—Mr. Scott conveniently dubbs him a Negro hater, as if there were no "slipshod Negresses" (Mr. MacFall was surely unaware of the unreasonable prejudice existing against the use of this feminine substantive. I myself, who can scarcely be called a "Negro hater," have often employed it, because all its synonyms are exceedingly clumsy).

It would be quite as just, after reading that powerful novel, The Fire in the Flint, to call Mr. Walter White a white-man hater, but I am sure no good critic would think of doing so. Until novels about Negroes, by either white or coloured writers, are regarded as dispassionately from the aesthetic standpoint as books about Chinese mandarins, I see little hope ahead for the new school of Negro authors. What, for example, will become of one of the most promising of the lot, Mr. Rudolph Fisher, if he be attacked from this angle? Would it be possible, indeed, for a white man to publish that fine story, The City of Refuge, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for February 1925, without being called a Negro hater?

It will be recalled that Synge's poetic comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, was hissed in Dublin because the author, himself an Irishman, asked a character to refer to the heroine as appearing in her shift. This was construed as a direct insult to Irish womanhood. This attitude may always be expected from the uncultured mob. When it is detected in a book review in a serious magazine it may, however, be regarded with alarm. I am convinced, as a matter of fact, that such an attitude does more harm to a race in the eyes of its ready detractors than any amount of ridicule—and I persist hotly that Jezebel was never intended as ridicule—aimed from without.

The matter reduces itself to this, that the Negro is sensitive, justifiably so, regarding his past, and in facing the world wants to put on a new front. He is therefore inclined to conceal his beautiful Spirituals, his emotional Blues, to make too little of his original dances, to write, when he is an author, about an environment far removed from the sordid but fantastic existence of Lenox Avenue. Thus he readily delivers his great gifts to the exploitation of the white man without—save in rare instances —making any attempt, an attempt foredoomed to meet with success, to capitalize them himself. It is significant, however, that the great Negroes almost invariably climb to fame with material which is the heritage of their race. Perhaps even in the case of Roland Hayes it may be discovered that more people attend his concerts to hear him sing Spirituals than to hear him sing Schubert lieder.