478 Making It New: 1900–1945more wholesome growth in the future, it may on the contrary truly democratize.”
But, on the whole, The New Negro performed the remit Locke had set for himself
here: to announce, as he put it, “a dramatic flowering of a new race-spirit ... among
American Negroes” – and to capture the optimism that accompanied that flowering –
a burgeoning sense of communal energy, collective cultural power and joy.
A very different perspective on the Harlem Renaissance, however, is offered in
Infants of the Spring (1932), a satirical roman à clef by Wallace Thurman (1902–1934).
Thurman was a talented poet, playwright, editor, and literary critic, as well as a
novelist. Joining with Hughes, Hurston, and a handful of other young black writers
and artists in 1926, he helped to publish Fire!!, the most iconoclastic magazine black
America had ever produced. Its many scandalized critics extinguished Fire!! after
only one issue. Undaunted, Thurman went on to experience success in 1929 with his
play Harlem, which ran for over ninety performances at the Apollo Theatre, and to
write three notable novels: The Blacker the Berry (1929), an exploration of a subject
taboo in most earlier African-American fiction, interracial prejudice and the self-
hatred engendered by it; The Interne (co-authored with A. L. Forman (1929)); and
Infants of the Spring. Thurman was a scathing critic of the bourgeois attitudes that,
he believed, motivated the Harlem Renaissance old guard like Locke and Du Bois,
claiming they proclaimed aesthetic and intellectual freedom while seeking white
approval with slanted portraits of African-Americans. And his aim, he declared, was
to create black characters “who still retained some individual race qualities and who
were not totally white American in every respect save skin color”: an aim he shared,
in his opinion, with many of the younger generation of black writers, including the
co-editors of Fire!! In Infants of the Spring Alain Locke is satirized in the character of
Dr. A. L. Parkes, the pompous, self-appointed leader of a literary salon given to vapid
prophecies about a new racial millennium. Hurston becomes Sweetie May, “a short
story writer, more noted for her ribald wit and personal effervescence than for any
actual literary work.” While Countee Cullen is transformed into De Witt Clinton,
“acclaimed as the most handsome Negro in Harlem by a certain group of whites.” In
his account of what he terms the “niggerati,” a self-absorbed, self-congratulatory
coterie more concerned with promoting themselves than furthering the interests of
their race, Thurman spares few of his contemporaries, or even himself. Only Jean
Toomer is said to have “elements of greatness.” Even Langston Hughes, depicted as
Tony Crews, is damned with faint praise: “his work was interesting and unusual,” the
reader is told, “it was also spotty.” “I don’t expect to be a great writer,” declares the
protagonist of Infants of the Spring, Raymond Taylor, who becomes Thurman’s own
fictional surrogate, mirror, and mouthpiece. “I don’t think the Negro race can
produce one now, any more than can America.”
Satirized by Thurman, celebrated by Locke, the New Negro movement of the
1920s and beyond did nevertheless help produce a host of writers. Many of them
were good, and some of them were surely great. Among the novelists and short
storytellers, these writers included Randolph Fisher (1897–1934), the author of the
first African-American detective novel, The Conjure Man Dies (1932), whose
collected short stories, City of Refuge, was published in 1987, and Walter WhiteGGray_c04.indd 478ray_c 04 .indd 478 8 8/1/2011 7:54:03 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 03 AM