Harlem Stomp! by Laban Carrick Hill

Author:Laban Carrick Hill [HILL, LABAN CARRICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JNF000000
ISBN: 9780316040488
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Above, Carl Van Vechten. Right, a caricature of Van Vechten by Miguel Covarrubias as an African American.

“What Mr. Van Vechten has written is just what those who do not know us think about all of us.”

— Richetta Randolph, James Weldon Johnson’s secretary

THE RIFT

SIMMERING BELOW THE surface of the renaissance’s blazing creativity was a rift that went unacknowledged until one of the most controversial novels of the age appeared on the scene — Nigger Heaven. Written by Carl Van Vechten, a white critic and Harlem enthusiast, Nigger Heaven was published in 1926 and quickly became a bestseller. Largely forgotten today, the novel wallowed in what Van Vechten believed to be the “squalor of Negro life, the vice of Negro life.” Its plot was overwrought and melodramatic in its portrayal of a young man who deserts his true love for the exotic mysteries of an older woman. When this woman rejects him for another man, the young man attempts to murder his usurper. Nigger Heaven was the first fictional treatment of Harlem and African-American urban life written by a white. As a novelty, it created a storm in the general media, but many Harlemites felt betrayed by Van Vechten, to whom they had opened their doors. Richetta Randolph, James Weldon Johnson’s secretary, summed up her shock in a letter to a vacationing Johnson: “To the very end I hoped for something which would make me feel that he had done Negro Harlem a service with his work. . . . What Mr. Van Vechten has written is just what those who do not know us think about all of us.”

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