Remade in America

WHEN I was in first grade, I wrote in an assignment that I wanted to be “a poetess like Phillis Wheatley” when I grew up. I’d seen only one drawing of Phillis Wheatley, but it made an impression -- a black woman in a frilly cap, quill pen poised in one hand, chin in the other. She was prim, serious, purposeful. In the mid-1700s, she’d somehow gone from being a slave to being a poet, who mastered complicated forms of poetry that had been the exclusive domain of the white folks who once owned her. This felt like the height of heroism to me, and I resolved to become a Phillis Wheatley in my own time. I would be a New Negro.

Wheatley lived long before the official age of the New Negro, a long-standing trope that came into vogue in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, when a critical mass of black writers based in New York broadened the narrow definitions of black literature and black artistry in general. But the concept goes as far back as Wheatley; slavery’s dehumanizing legacy demanded a New Negro, who would literally throw off the chains of history to become something different, as Wheatley had. Of course, in her time, Wheatley was seen as an “exceptional” Negro, not the vanguard of a new one.

The 1920s might have brought a renaissance, but this was only 50 years after Reconstruction: How far had that perception of the “exceptional Negro” moved? How “new” was the Negro anyway? These are among the uneasy but fascinating questions raised in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett’s anthology, “The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture.” Because “New Negro” is really just a catchphrase for the capacious topic of race in America, this is less an anthology than a mix of articles, criticism, essays, theories, calls to action and commentary by people both black and white, ranging from famous (Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, H.L. Mencken) to those lesser known but prominent in their time (Alain Locke). The result is a spirited, if sometimes redundant, dialectic tracing the most intense period of New Negro discussions, between 1892 and 1938.

Much was happening then to fuel the discussion: the fading promise of Reconstruction and black freedom, the rise of lynchings and Jim Crow, the deepening disagreement among such black leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey about the best way forward for the race. There was also World War I. Black soldiers who fought tyranny overseas came home with heightened expectations that racial tyranny might finally be fought at home. It wasn’t.

“New Negro,” therefore, became a rallying cry, a public-relations campaign meant to convince whites -- and blacks -- that black people were worthy Americans, or even just plain Americans. It was the counter to the white South’s successful campaign to claim a moral victory in the years after the Civil War and excise the newly freed Negroes from its future. New Negro advocates were not trying to reinvent blacks but simply to insert them into meaningful daily life -- not just in the South but throughout the country. The task was daunting; while the Negro had been reborn, America had not. As black educator William Pickens noted in 1916, “The ‘new Negro’ is not really new: he is the same Negro under new conditions and subjected to new demands.”

Those conditions and demands were often as intolerable as those under slavery, because now blacks had to evince an Americanness and intellectual competence that had been thwarted for centuries. “The New Negro” is thus full of impassioned oratory about how the race deserved a chance, oratory that strove to meet or exceed the Victorian standards of the day, the more soaring the better. In “An Appeal to the King”(1895), addressing the “invisible” monarch who held “a front seat in the halls of legislation”), theologian J.W.E. Bowen declared: “Finally, oh king! a new Negro has come upon the stage of action. . . . With this new birth of the soul, he longs for an opportunity to grow into the proportions of a new and diviner manhood that shall take its place in the ranks of one common humanity.”

The biblical overtone was no accident: In coming up from slavery, the New Negro was to redeem himself and a fallen America as well. But America wanted redemption only on its own terms, if at all. Here was a paradox: New Negroes were self-created, but the creations needed white approval. One bold solution to this power struggle was offered by activist Hubert H. Harrison in “The New Politics” (1920). “Striving to be men, and finding no effective aid in government or in politics, the Negro of the Western world must follow the path of the Swadesha movement of India and the Sinn Fein movement of Ireland,” he wrote. “The meaning of both these terms is ‘ourselves first.’ ” Good idea. But who exactly is “ourselves”? Throughout the anthology, “the Negro” and “the new Negro” almost never refer to a real person but to an abstraction. This nebulousness is partly intentional, a refutation of the hard lines of the slave identity that blacks wanted to dissolve for good. Yet here was another paradox: How were they to leave behind the ruin of slavery but keep alive the formative past essential to the art and politics of any successful people?

Such questions were -- and still are -- generally trumped by the more immediate mission of changing the archetype. Slavery had been justified through carefully constructed imagery of blacks as inferior and subhuman; more than any other ethnic group, blacks have had to be concerned with image rehabilitation. “Almost as soon as blacks could write . . . ,” Gates and Jarrett say in their introduction,”they set out to redefine -- against already received racist stereotypes -- who and what a black person was, and how unlike the racist stereotype the black original could actually be. . . . If various Western cultures constructed blackness as an absence, then various generations of black authors have attempted to reconstruct blackness as a presence.”

The nature of that presence was not always agreed upon across and within color lines. “So far as your complaint at the variety of derogatory portrayals of Negro life, character and self-expression,” wrote Julia Peterkin, a white novelist known for sympathetic portrayals of blacks, in a 1926 symposium in the Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, “does it occur to an Irishman or a Jew to imagine . . . that the cultural standing or development of their races are or could be seriously affected by the grotesqueries of ‘Mr. Jiggs’ or ‘Mr. Potash?’ ” Peterkin goes on, almost offhandedly, “If America has produced a type more worthy of admiration and honor than the ‘Black Negro Mammy,’ I fail to have heard of it.”

Composer John W. Work rightly holds that black spirituals are original American music, but his encomium echoes Peterkin’s treacly praise of mammies: The Negro “sings of courage, patience, humility, faith, hope, endurance, Joy, and Love, and in all the hundreds of songs we know, there is not the slightest hint of any such sentiment as bitterness, hatred, or revenge.” Harriet Beecher Stowe couldn’t have said it better.

We still grapple with the question of Negro identity, still tinker with a workable model, still wonder (even those of us in our 40s) whether to aspire to be Phillis Wheatley, Oprah or, as Locke put it, simply one of the folk. We’re obsessed with the paradigm shifts represented by the rise of Barack Obama and resurgence of Bill Cosby, by golfer Tiger Woods and actor Will Smith (recently described by this newspaper as the first “post-black movie star”), by gangsta rap that seems entirely antithetical to the post-slavery New Negro tradition of betterment and uplift. Where, and who, are black people in all this? The answer seems to lie, as it did last century and the century before, just above our heads.