English 223
Term 2, Week 1
To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who
underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white
man, who is their next-door neighbor, I say: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service,
and in the professions. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to
freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions
of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn
to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common
occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between
the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No
race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing
a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we
permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign
birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I
would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast
it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity
and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of
your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes
and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and
cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make
possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down
your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on
these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will
buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your
factories.
“Hundreds of students and teachers had been herded into the sun-backed chapel to
listen to the banal, the patronizing, and even the insulting remarks of one of the
renowned white preachers of state […] he had said that if all Negroes would only
take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct themselves in the manner of the
Naxos products, there would be no race problem, because Naxos Negroes knew
what was expected of them. They had good sense and they had good taste. They
knew enough to stay in their places and that, said the preacher, showed good taste.
He spoke of his great admiration for the Negro race, no other race in so short a
time had made so much progress, but he had urgently besought them to know
when and where to stop. He hoped, he sincerely hoped, that they wouldn’t become
avaricious and grasping, thinking only of adding to their earthly goods, for that
would be a sin in the sight of Almighty God. And then he had spoken of
contentment, embellishing his words with scriptural quotations and pointing out to
them that it was their duty to be satisfied in the estate to which they had been
called, hewers of wood and drawers of water. And then he had prayed” (3)
Naxos
“The dean was a woman from one of the ‘first families’ – a great ‘race’
woman; she, Helga Crane, a despised mulatto, but something intuitive,
some unanalyzed driving spirit of loyalty to the inherent racial need for
gorgeousness told her that bright colours were fitting and that darkcomplexioned people should wear yellow, green, and red. Black, brown,
and gray were ruinous to them, actually destroyed the luminous tones
lurking in their dusky skins. One of the loveliest sights Helga had ever
seen had been a sooty black girl decked out in a flaming orange dress,
which a horrified matron had next day consigned to the dyer. Why, she
wondered, didn’t someone write A Plea for color?
These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race
pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of
color, joy of rhythmic motion, naïve, spontaneous laughter. Harmony,
radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race
they had marked for destruction” (18)
“Somewhere,
within her,
in a deep recess,
crouched
discontent”
Harlem
“‘To me,’ asserted Anne Grey, ‘the most wretched Negro prostitute that walks One
Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street is more than any president of these United States,
not excepting Abraham Lincoln.’ But she turned up her finely carved nose at their
lusty churches, their picturesque parades, their naïve clowning on the streets. […] She
hated white people with a deep and burning hatred, with the kind of hatred which,
finding itself held in sufficiently numerous groups, was capable some day, on some
great provocation, of bursting into dangerously malignant flames.
But she aped their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living.
While proclaiming loudly the undiluted good of all things Negro, she yet disliked the
songs, the dances, and the softly blurred speech of the race. Toward these things she
showed only a disdainful contempt, tinged sometimes with a faint amusement. Like
the despised people of the white race, she preferred Pavlova to Florence Mills, John
McCormack to Taylor Gordon, Walter Hampden to Paul Robeson. Theoretically,
however, she stood for the immediate advancement of all things Negroid, and was in
revolt against social inequality” (59)
Copenhagen
“Helga Crane was not amused. Instead she was filled with a fierce hatred
for the cavorting Negroes on the stage. She felt ashamed, betrayed, as if
these pale pink and white people among whom she lived had suddenly
been invited to look upon something in her which she had hidden away
and wanted to forget. And she was shocked at the avidity at which Olsen
beside her drank it in.
But later, when she was alone, it became quite clear to her that all along
they had divined its presence, had known that in her was something, some
characteristic, different from any that they themselves possessed. Else why
had they decked her out as they had? Why subtly indicated that she was
different? Any they hadn’t despised it. No, they had admired it, rated it as
a precious thing, a thing to be enhanced, preserved. Why? She, Helga
Crane, didn’t admire it. She suspected that no Negroes, no Americans,
did. Else why their constant slavish imitation of traits not their own? Why
their constant begging to be considered as exact copies of other people?
Even the enlightened, the intelligent ones demanded nothing more”
The South
“So, though with growing yearning she longed for the great ordinary
things of life, hunger, sleep, freedom from pain, she resigned herself to
doing without them. The possibility of alleviating her burdens by a
greater faith became lodged in her mind. She gave herself up to it. It
did help. And the beauty of leaning on the wisdom of God, trusting,
gave to her a queer sort of satisfaction. Faith was really quite easy. The
more weary, the more weak she became, the easier it was. Her religion
to her a kind of protective coloring, shielding her from the cruel light
of an unbearable reality.
This utter yielding in faith to what had been sent her found her favor,
too, in the eyes of her neighbors. Her husband’s flock began to
approve and comment this submission and humility to superior
wisdom. The womenfolk spoke more kindly and more affectionately of
the preacher’s Northern wife” (126)
The End of Desire
“It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and cities,
about clothes and books, a out the sweet mingled smell of
Houbigant and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with
inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophisticated tuneless
music. It was so hard to think about a feasible way of retrieving
all these agreeable, desired things. Just then. Later. When she got
up. By and by. She must rest. Get strong. Sleep. Then afterwards,
she could work out some arrangement. So she dozed and
dreamed in snatches of sleeping and waking, letting time run on.
Away.
And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again
without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of
the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child”
“Larsen stressed the contradictory nature of the search
for a female self by refusing the romance and
structuring the relation of the individual to the social
formation through the interconnection of sexual,
racial, and class identity. The conclusion of the text
offered no imaginary resolutions to the contradictions
Larsen raised. As readers, we are left mediating on the
problematic nature of alternative possibilities of a social
self. Consider the metaphor of quicksand; it is a
condition where individual struggle and isolated effort
are doomed to failure” –Hazel Carby