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IMPERMANENT BLACKNESS
Korey Garibaldi
ISBN 978-0-691-21190-9
Remove from your shelves the books by white supremacists and much
would go. Walt Whitman for a start who wrote: “The nigger, like the
Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history. A
superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared
out.” Allowing for a margin of irony, it’s appalling. Ezra Pound,
Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Allen Tate, Kerouac whose
romanticisation of the lives of blacks was inherently racist,
Conrad, Lawrence, Larkin. Could Jane Austen remain, in spite of her
opposition to slavery, which doesn’t presuppose a belief in
equality? Maybe Chaucer would have to go on the basis of what’s in
The Man of Law’s Tale, or simply because he absorbed the
wrong-headedness of his time. For five centuries at least, the world
has rested on conquest, founded on racism in pursuit of lucre. It
would be surprising if literature were not marinated in the
assumption that a white skin means superiority.
Garibaldi has explored American publishing and editing from the
early 20th century to the 1970s and discovered a positive
seam: interracial collaborations which permitted some black writers
to thrive. Frank Yerby was highly commercially successful, selling
in total some fifteen million books. Garibaldi doesn’t enter into
literary criticism: was Yerby a good writer? That isn’t his
territory here. He’s asking whether the interracial means could
close the divide between white and non-white writers. The evaluation
of literary value is for another time.
What he uncovers is that in spite of the success of the venture the
push-back was persistent and vicious.
One of the unusual aspects of the book is its references to
publishing data, usually ignored on the grounds that discussing the
politics of these matters is sour-grapes. In 1906, for example,
7,139 books were published in the US, by 1910, the figure was
13,470. This was the cultural renaissance of the years leading up to
the First World War, which had fallen apart by the end of the 1920s.
W.S. Braithwaite was enhancing the status of poetry by publishing
his anthology, in response to which Pound wrote of the US being
“stung by the negroid lash of Mr Braithwaite.” Pound was nasty and
demented, but for popularity he couldn’t match Thomas Dixon, Baptist
minister, whose novel The Clansman, venerating the KKK was first
shown in Woodrow Wilson’s White House and became, in 1915, The
Birth of a Nation. The extraordinary success of the film is
indicative of the breadth and depth of white supremacism in the
U.S.A. at the time and also of the denial and confabulation which
form the essence of the reactionary strand of U.S. non-thinking. In
such an atmosphere, what chance was there for interracial editing
and publishing?
Seminal in resisting, was Ray Stannard Baker, whose series of
essays, published from 1907, are seen as the first attempt to
discuss rationally and objectively the question of “race” (we ought
to dispense with the term as it depicts a fantasy – white
supremacism ought to take its place). Garibaldi points out the irony
that Baker’s essays were published in book form by Doubleday and
Page, who had issued The Clansman. Walter Hines Page, who ran
the publishing house, claimed to be committed to a wide range of
authors, but was in truth probably simply commercially
opportunistic. Gertrude Stein had to bring out Three Lives at her
own expense. When it found a publisher, she was told it was too
unusual to tempt book shop buyer: part of its oddness was certainly
ints treatment of inter-racial relations.
Tagore’s The Gardener (1913) sold a hundred thousand in the
UK. A sign of shifting opinion, but
it was far too early and the success too limited to start
thinking, as Tagore did, that doors had burst open. In the year
Tagore’s book appeared, Pound wrote: “Sorry to learn Braithwaite is
a nigger…A Boston coon!! That explains a lot.” He had earlier
described Hitler as a saint, a Jeanne d’Arc. Incidentally, there are
those who say, keep the writer the work separate. Unfortunately, it
never works: the vile attitudes Pound embraced can be discerned in
the form of his poetry.
The economics of publishing makes a difference: between 1917 and
1919 the cost of paper in the USA doubled, which meant fewer
opportunities all round, which had a significant effect on black
writers. Charles Chesnutt sent the manuscript of Paul Marchand:
Free Man of Colour to Hoghton Mifflin in 1921. They responded
that conditions were unfavourable. The book appeared in 1999. Trying
to cash in on Charles Wood’s trend in Nigger; A Novel (1922),
Ronald Firbank published Prancing Nigger in 1924, an example
of the gross misrepresentation of people of colour by white writers.
It seems admitting people of colour into literature as half-wits and
gabbling fools was taken by some whites
as a step forward. Carl Sandburg advocated the use of the
term “nigger” as the standard description in 1925. Sandburg had
earlier written of Braithwaite as a fungus. When Sandburg published
a collection of essays in 1919, Walter Lippmann wrote the
introduction, arguing in favour of segregation, effectively
apartheid. Lippmann was, of course, a chief spokesman for the notion
of keeping the interfering masses out of decision making.
H.L. Mencken referred to Braithwaite as a “coon”, Allen Tate and
John Gould Fletcher thought Braithwaite’s anthology too inclusive
and Tate was one of the Fugitive Poets whose definitive statement
was their collection I’ll Take My Stand, with its obvious
reference to the Confederacy. Robert Penn Warren was a contributor
who argued in favour of higher education for coloured people, but
doubted its worth without segregation. Sherwood Anderson expressed
the view that too many people of colour were doing “too much of the
contributing”.
In 1933, Langston Hughes submitted a story to Scribener’s
which included a white woman who gives birth to a child of colour.
It was rejected on the grounds “it would frighten our good
middle-class audience to death”. It’s interesting to speculate how
much work is still rejected for the same reason.
Gertrude Stein, who got to know Richard Wright in Paris, advised him
against publishing Black Boy, suggesting it was too
predictable. The book sold six hundred thousand copies in six
months. Native Son had sold two hundred thousand in three
weeks. Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door (1947)
(praised by Eleanor Roosevelt) sold nearly one hundred thousand,
tying for first place
with Yerby’s second novel in 1947. Of course, none of these figures
say anything about literary quality, though Wright is obviously a
serious figure. Motley’s novel, made into a film starring Bogart,
has a Italian rather than a person of colour at its centre. It may
tilt more towards pulp than Tolstoy, but Garibaldi’s point is that
if whites are publishing commercial books and doing well, why
shouldn’t people of colour? There always has been a division between
high lit and the throwaway stuff and always will be, just as people
will always be tempted by sweet foods; but Garibaldi is charting
how, in spite of appalling hatred and opposition, some writers of
colour managed to make their way.
There’s an enlightening chapter on children’s literature.
Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo was the best children could expect in
the early twentieth century. Muriel Fuller, whose mother Olive was a
stereotypical southern white supremacist who feared “nigs” were
getting into influential positions, worked to change things. Carter
G. Woodson, a Harvard man of colour asked the pertinent question
about the depiction of coloured people in books: “Why not exploit,
enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard
as inferior?” Virginia Kirkus, one of the pioneering women in
publishing, was blasé about the depiction of coloured people as
subservient in children’s books and also remarked that “publishing
must be a business, first and foremost”, an assumption which
deserves some examination. Garibaldi doesn’t enter this territory:
is there an alternative to capitalist publishing? If there is an
alternative to capitalism, which is beyond doubt, there must be. Why
shouldn’t publishing be first and foremost about quality. Commercial
publishing, as Garibaldi points out, is always about how much not
what or how good. Edward Uhlan who tried to establish an alternative
to commercial domination commented that “shoddy-looking books” don’t
sell. Such is the cleft stick little presses find themselves in.
The Committee for the Negro in the Arts was smeared as a communist
front, a false accusation which destroyed it. Lorraine Hansbury’s
FBI file ran to more than a thousand pages. When James Baldwin, Lena
Horne and others met Robert Kennedy at his family’s New York
penthouse (whose address he didn’t know) Kennedy dismissed Jerome
Smith: “I’ll talk to you who are civilised. But who is he?” Hansbury
told him Smith was the person he should be listening to. Kennedy was
interested in statistics, but was incapable of emotional connection
to the experience of coloured people and couldn’t accept that white
supremacism was a moral issue.
Garibaldi argues for the interracial efforts up to the 1960s, but is
dubious about the Black Power movement and the Civil Rights
campaign, on the grounds that they incited division. Hansbury’s
excellent play. A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which inspired hope of
betterment in its time, couldn’t be replicated twenty years later:
there was too much accentuation of divisions between whites and
non-whites. Garibaldi suggests a work like Michelle Obama’s
autobiography rehearses an older tradition of literary celebrity for
coloured people. This is where his argument breaks down: the book is
simply cynical cashing in. In the same way, his contention that
Obama himself is the best example of integration, ignores the
President’s dismal record, especially in foreign policy where he
continued the work of the Bushes, and indeed, every U.S. Leader
since 1945.
Garibaldi’s thesis is pushing towards the notion that integration is
possible: people of colour can participate as equals in American
capitalism. Somewhat questionable given the crucial role of white
supremacism in the history of America’s wealth and power.
His sense that the sixties
overturned the steady vessel of integration is dubious. That people
of colour should have a fair deal in the existing system is a sound
moral position, but equality between whites and people of colour is
best attained and preserved by the attainment of equality in
general. Equality is a moral urgency.
In spite of his unconvincing concluding argument, Garibaldi’s book
explores a little considered territory, is thoroughly researched and
replete with necessary detail.
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