The Harlem Renaissance was one of the first cohesive cultural movements in African-American history, but white support was the grease that kept its wheels in motion.
Enter Carl Van Vechten, critic, novelist, archivist, photographer, and Negrophile. He was a mover and a shaker, a pushy culture broker with grand ideas. One of his ideas was that black art forms were American art forms. Today this is no longer an idea but a fact. Virtually no other white critic was saying this in the 1920s, however, when Van Vechten began extolling the virtues of black music and dance in the The New York Times and Vanity Fair. As a writer, he was unique; he crossed lines that weren’t supposed to be crossed by white people. I have yet to encounter anyone else like him, living or dead, which explains why I have been a devoted fan for 25 years.
Van Vechten was not a patron of black artists in the traditional sense. By the time he had immersed himself in blackness, he didn’t want for money. But he had something bigger to offer the artists he revered: public praise. He took out an ad in the Times to gush over Ethel Waters’s performance in the 1939 Broadway hit Mamba’s Daughters, calling it “a magnificent example of great acting, simple, deeply felt, moving on a plane of complete reality.” It was less an ad than an endorsement, and it was signed by people, white people, including Tallulah Bankhead, Burgess Meredith, Oscar Hammerstein II, and the actress Fania Marinoff, who was Van Vechten’s wife.
Until the end of his life, Van Vechten remained a fan of black art and a useful friend to black artists. But as a white man who made himself a central player in a black movement, he was trouble. He still causes trouble. He has caused trouble for me.
It is February 25, 2001. I am at a black bookstore in Washington. My first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, has just been published. I have been invited here to give a reading.
In the audience, a young black man with a mustache and wearing a baseball cap sits straight up in his chair, directly in my line of sight. He closes and opens his eyes in deep, long blinks. Too long. Stop looking at him, I tell myself. Blink. Un-blink. Is he bored? Falling asleep? He crosses his arms. He folds his hands in his lap. His eyes remain closed, then open. I talk louder. But he isn’t bored or falling asleep, I soon discover. He is annoyed.
After my talk, I sit behind a table and sign books. The blinking man is at the end of the line. He shuffles a bit and looks at his watch. After a few minutes, he stands in front of me and explains why he will not buy a copy of the book. He is a fan of Langston Hughes, he wants me to understand, and it is because of his fondness for Hughes that he has come to my reading. He is not interested, however, in that other man, that white man. He had closed his eyes whenever I mentioned Van Vechten’s name during my reading as an act of protest. He looks at me and waits. On his face, I see no anger, only expectation. He wants to begin a conversation, but it is a conversation I am not yet prepared to have. I thank him for coming. He congratulates me on the book—the fact of it—and leaves.
I understand.
Langston Hughes has long symbolized black joy and black pride, and to celebrate the black poet is to celebrate blackness and celebrate ourselves. For every self there must be an other, and blackness must be distinguished from whiteness in order for it to thrive with racial integrity. We celebrate the Harlem Renaissance as a “black” cultural movement. The trouble with Carl Van Vechten is not that he was white but that he stood too close to blackness. A line must be maintained.
But there isn’t any line. There is no such thing as race. “Black” and “white” are arbitrary “constructions.” This is the gospel I learned in graduate school, and this same gospel I now preach in my classroom. But then Trayvon Martin and Kenneth Chamberlain are murdered, and suddenly it doesn’t matter whether race is a construction or not. Racism is true even if “race” itself is a fiction. Days after the murders, I sit in front of my computer and prepare a talk on my new book and ask of the screen: What does this talk have to do with anything? Pauline Hopkins, a formidable 19th-century activist and fiction writer, once asked: “Of what use is fiction to the colored race at the present crisis in its history?” But then she answered her own question in the foreword to her 1900 novel, Contending Forces: “It is the simple, homely tale, unassumingly told, which cements the bond of brotherhood among all classes and all complexion.”
Carl Van Vechten was a person who looks more complicated than he actually was. He was a white man who loved blackness; he was driven by passion and desire. At first he loved only the idea of black people, but then he grew up. “I remember coming home almost jubilantly after a night in Harlem,” he said in 1960, “and telling my wife in great glee that I hated a Negro, I’d found one I hated.” He called that moment his “complete emancipation.” “Up to that time I had considered them all as one,” he said. “Now, I feel about them exactly the way I feel about white people.”
If George Zimmerman felt about black people exactly the way he felt about white people, Trayvon Martin might be alive.
I finished the talk; I believed I had something important to say. I finished the talk for the same reason I wrote a book about Van Vechten: I believe his story has something to offer in this current climate, in which racist violence seems as commonplace as the lynchings that dominated the political and social landscape of the world in which Pauline Hopkins lived. Racism happens out there but it also happens in here, in the interiors of our lives. My inspiration for writing about Van Vechten was the intimacy he enjoyed with his black friends, like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Dorothy Peterson, Nora Holt and Nella Larsen. They loved Van Vechten the way he loved blackness: with great and abiding passion. They loved Van Vechten because he loved blackness.
I’m fascinated by the way race did and did not play a role in their friendships. It’s the same way I experience race in my own intimate relationships. When Van Vechten and Nella Larsen, for instance, talked about race, they did so with both irreverence and awe. Blackness—style, culture, art—was wonderful and humorous to all of them. They ignored conventional boundaries of decorum when they talked about racial difference, just as they flouted the social logic of Jim Crow by enjoying each other’s company at all. As a black woman writing a book about a white man—and not just any white man, but one with a uniquely bad reputation in African-American cultural history—I felt I was continuing in their tradition.
There is a more sober side to the story of Van Vechten and his passion for blackness. Plenty of black people during the 1920s and beyond felt that he loved blackness a little too much. At the very least, Nigger Heaven, a novel Van Vechten published in 1926, represents a bit of overkill, a hammering insistence that the world recognize his passion for blackness and his status as an “honorary Negro,” which explains the title—he simply felt that, as an honorary black person, an insider, he had a right to use the racist epithet in the ironic way that black people do. A lot of people thought he was wrong. But not his friends, who saw his artistic freedom as intimately related to their own artistic freedom.
Van Vechten called Nigger Heaven “one of the oldest stories in the world, the story of the Prodigal Son, without the happy end of that biblical history.” The novel turns on a doomed romance between two uptight black characters, Mary Love, a librarian, and Byron Kasson, a writer, both of whom are too cerebral and civilized for their own good. They’ve lost contact with the primitive within, the life force that is the birthright of all black people, according to Van Vechten. Byron fails in romance and also at writing because he disdains and represses the innate racial characteristics that he should love. You can read the book as a celebration of racial difference or you can read the book as a directive to black writers to stay in their place. But what must also be understood is that black artists, too, believed in primitivism; it was the language of modernism.
There are rational arguments to make about whether or not Van Vechten appropriated black art and enforced racial stereotypes. There are serious intellectual critiques to make of his attachment to blackness. But there is also mystery. A blogger recently criticized me for being, seemingly, unable to make sense of the mystery of Carl Van Vechten’s passion for blackness. But what the blogger fails to understand is that the root of any passion is always a mystery. It was with the beautiful mystery of blackness itself that Van Vechten fell desperately, unquenchably in love.
As I researched Van Vechten’s life, I didn’t so much ignore the troubling aspects as follow them into deeper territory. His fixed ideas about black art represented facets of his public position on racial difference. But in his private world, there were subtleties, nuances, contradictions, and layers. His bonds with black friends were sparked by his admiration of the art they presented to the public, but they were maintained by those ineffable qualities that sustain any deep bond.
“You’re going to get into trouble,” a friend warned years ago when I began writing about Van Vechten. My friend meant it as a compliment. For a long time I didn’t think I was up for it, and I waffled. I was unfaithful. I put other books before this one. But then another friend introduced me to “Use Trouble,” a poem by Michael S. Harper. She suggested that I consider the title of the poem as a piece of advice.
I am drawn to Van Vechten because of the trouble that he caused. When I was working on Remember Me to Harlem, most people assumed that I had begun the book out of an attachment to Langston Hughes. But, relatively speaking at least, Langston Hughes is easy to love and thus, for me, less compelling. Like any contrarian, I am drawn to the bad object. However, in his abundant and bottomless love for blackness, Van Vechten, I believe, is good: for the culture and for me. He is good because he encourages us to ask interesting questions like, Can a white writer write a black story? Or, Can a black writer write a white story? He is good because he took pleasure in deep interracial communion that sometimes feels impossible in our hopeless racial climate. I understand and appreciate where the blinking man was coming from; I do not wish to transform him. But I do believe there are many readers like me, who will find inspiration in the trouble Van Vechten caused, the lines that he crossed, and the passion he inspired while doing both.