I found the friendship between Emma Lou and Gwendolyn interesting because of the parallel upbringings of the two characters. Emma Lou’s conviction that lighter skinned people are the “right kind of people” comes from her mother’s belief system, and, similarly, Gwendolyn’s preference for darker friends and men comes from her mother’s insistence that this is the way in which to achieve complete interracial tolerance (198). Both of these young women are clearly the products of the values that their mothers instilled in them as children, and although they have different perspectives and goals, both Emma Lou and Gwendolyn in fact increase their color consciousness as a result of their attempts to fulfill their mothers’ solutions to the race problem. Although Gwendolyn is one of the only characters in this novel who actively attempts to eliminate color consciousness and interracial prejudice, Thurman highlights her inability to match her actions to her beliefs. When she becomes frustrated with Emma Lou’s preference for a light-skinned man, she displays prejudice against Emma Lou because of her skin color, stating, “There’s probably something in this stuff about black people being different and more low than other colored people. You’re just a common ordinary nigger!” (208). Furthermore, though she prides herself on her preference for dark-skinned men, Gwendolyn intends to marry Benson, the light-skinned man she did not approve of as a match for Emma Lou (213). These scenes highlight hypocrisy in Gwendolyn’s character; although she acts according to her mother’s beliefs, she proves unable to separate herself from interracial prejudice. Although the friendship between Emma Lou and Gwendolyn is fulfilling to both characters because it enables Emma Lou to feel accepted by the “right kind of people” and allows Gwendolyn the opportunity to prove that she does not have a “’pink’ complex, this friendship actually highlights the color consciousness of both women and provides a critique of Gwendolyn’s attempt to promote interracial tolerance.

There are several instances in the text in which Thurman seems to suggest that race is something that can be performed, something that requires an audience, or something that one might try to manipulate by donning a costume or putting on a mask. An early example is Hazel, from USC, whom Emma Lou views as disgracefully playing the role of the primitive Negro. Emma Lou disdains Hazel’s “circus-like appearance” (44) and “darky-like clownishness” (46), feeling ashamed by the way in which Hazel “play[s] the darky for the amused white students” (55). But if Hazel acts out the stereotype of the uncivilized Negro, then Emma Lou plays a role herself, constantly trying to mold herself into the likeness of what she conceives as ‘the right sort of people.’ The way in which she manipulates her appearance to better play this role is rather interesting, for she seems to sheds one mask for another; she uses acids and bleaching creams to “remove this unwelcome black mask from her face” (23) while dousing herself in powder and makeup to construct yet another mask to wear. If she considers her blackness a mask yet her efforts to reject it result in the donning of a new mask, do we ever see her authentic, unmasked self? (Perhaps at the end when she resolves to “begin life anew, always fighting, not so much for acceptance by other people, but for acceptance of herself by herself” (217)?) Other instances of performing race can be seen in the figure of Arline who literally performs as a mulatto in a show about Negro life, coating herself in powder to become darker. Emma Lou can recognize a sense of falsity in this sort of performance, more so than in her own, doubting the veracity of the plot and the characters and considering the show “a mad caricature” (105). Even the colored actresses in the show must make a performance of their race: “Their makeup and the lights gave them an appearance of sameness” (117). At the real cabaret, Emma Lou too senses “a note of artificiality” in the scene, aware that the two female entertainers are so self-consciously performing their race and gender for an audience of both white and black men and women. To her, the audience’s captivation implicates them in the performance: “At last the audience and the actors were as one” (110). Even at the house-rent party, what we might assume would be the closest approximation to authentic Harlem life, the party-goers are transformed into performers. Alva’s guests study the action with fervid interest and amazement, treating the partygoers, presumably, as material for future writings or artworks. However, there does seem to be a certain rawness to the house-rent party; the dancing and the music are more spontaneous, less contrived than the cabaret scenes. Emma Lou feels as though the atmosphere “create[s] another person in her stead” (149). But is this new person a more authentic version of Emma Lou, one that has loosened itself of its many masks, or is it yet another posture that she has assumed to accommodate herself to a new environment? Also, how is it that Emma Lou can detect the performance of race around her yet cannot own up to her own playacting?

I had a very negative reaction to the opening pages of The Blacker the Berry in that the depiction of self-hate was so vivid. Emma Lou’s own as well as her grandmother Maria Lightfoot’s self-hate for traits that mark them as having Black heritage reminds me of the internalized homophobia that queer people experience.

Emma Lou’s mother and uncle both do not marry “mulatto” people, and in Maria Lightfoot’s mind, “Joe’s wife was not as undesirable as Emma Lou’s father, for she was almost three-quarters Indian, and there was scant possibility that her children would have revolting dark skins, thick lips, spreading nostrils, and kinky hair” (30). The fiercely subjective language used to describe Black phenotypes, especially the word “revolting,” show a viscerally negative reaction in Maria toward some typical features of her Black ancestors. Like internalized homophobia, this internalized racism stems purely from society’s arbitrary norms about what is attractive and socially acceptable, such as straight hair, lighter skins, thin lips, and small noses. Because society devalues non-white physical attributes, this person of color herself believes that “whiter” looking people of color are superior, and she passes this anti-Black notion on to her granddaughter.

Also, I just wanted to note that Maria’s last name surely has some kind of connection to her preference for those whose bodies are lighter; I wonder what the significance of a lighter-colored foot might mean? Figuratively more carefree because of white privilege perhaps?

In Quicksand, Nella Larsen’s autobiographical aspects of her story, as Kimberly Monda writes in the spring 1997 issue of The African American Review, are extensive. From similar parentage, to their “escape” to Denmark, to their employment in libraries—biographical details taken from McDowell’s introduction—Helga Crane and Nella Larsen’s lives mirror or model one another. Even their names roll similarly, syllabically. And that’s a conflation between character and author—or rather, authorial voice—that troubled me throughout the text. The same conflation haunted readings of Nabokov’s novels, especially Lolita: whose desires and distastes are we really reading?

The tangling of author and character is, generally, misplaced, discounting the mediating activity of the author’s imagination in crafting a story, rather than adapting their own factual experiences. But the fact of autobiography in fiction opens up the question again—and here I found it a particularly troubling trend. Was the systematic, repetitive disgust Larsen’s, or her protagonist’s? Obviously, the first answer is the protagonist: that’s the mechanism of the novel. And when we read in the introductory comments to Fire!, that commentary claims to write as and not for, it almost seems as though autobiography would be more tempting, more fitting for that specific appeal, for the author to write as themselves, rather than for a character, posed and directed through a series of societal contexts.

But autobiography in this specific case would contradict my understanding of my novel, as a commentary on the protagonist as well as her surroundings. I read Larsen as looking down a little on her protagonist, critically, making some moments of rage feel self-indulgent rather than prudent, making some motivation questionable, particularly the religious catapult into marriage at the end. An autobiographical frame presents challenges for that kind of interpretation, if more of the stories’ phenomena belong to reporting, rather than critical invention.

I know of course that these two modes can intermingle, speak to and inform one another. But at the point where critics, like Monda, become clumsy with antecedents, where it almost seems inconsequential if the she refers to Larsen or Crane, if the popular or even scholarly distinction between authorial voice and character voice have broken down to a damaging degree, a degree that would bar certain interpretations—criticisms, satires, exaggeration—from consideration by Larsen’s readers.

“Yet, the New Negro must be seen in the perspective of a New World, and especially of a New America.”

“Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul”

These two lines from Alain Locke’s forward capture eloquently the impact the Harlem Renaissance had on the Black community and the World. As highlighted by James Weldon Johnson in “Harlem: The Culture Capital”, Harlem was the epicenter for this change in “perspective” and perception of the Negro, particularly as an artist. Bruce Nugent’s piece, “Sahdji” demonstrates a claim and celebration of the Negro heritage which of course contributes to that “new soul” mentioned by Locke.

Nugent begins Sahdji’s tale by focusing on her image which represents a powerful visual of the narrative. Sahdji’s figure is distinct and framed by geometric patterns characteristic of African art. This visual piece distinguishes one of the means through which the “New Negro” establishes “new centers” and finds a “new soul” because not only is Nugent celebrating an image characteristic of the African heritage but he also teaches the reader how to admire it through his piece. He highlights her “beautiful dark body” and her position as a “favorite wife” to denote her importance and instructing us on recognizing said importance in the image. Nugent’s combination of visual and verbal signals a transformation happening occurring within the literary community to best showcase art.

The writing of the narrative also evokes the idea of a “New Negro” in a “New World”. Nugent’s use of ellipses to punctuate and emphasize the narrative shows the experimentation, typical of the modernist time, and makes it harder for the reader to grasp. In addition to giving the writing modern qualities, the punctuation humanizes the narrator since each gap acts like a pause in thought. The blend of a modernist writer and one who celebrates the Negro culture/figure embodies Locke’s “New Negro”.