“Muttsy” is the story of Pinkie, an innocent
country girl who moves north to HARLEM. She ap-
pears at the chaotic boardinghouse of Ma Turner.
While she has little luggage, Pinkie has “everything
she needed in her face—many, many trunks full.”
In Harlem she attracts the attention of Muttsy, a
perennial gambler, who slips a diamond ring on her
finger while she is sleeping. Pinkie, completely dis-
traught by the wild ways of Ma Turner’s clientele,
leaves the house and Muttsy’s ring and seeks her
fortunes elsewhere. Her admirer eventually finds
her and persuades her to marry him. One month
later, a seemingly reformed Muttsy is the supervisor
of 200 laborers on the New York waterfront. Unfor-
tunately, he is unable to resist the lure of gambling.
“What man can’t keep one li’l wife an’ two li’l
bones?” he muses as he instructs a former rival from
Ma Turner’s to round up workers to play dice with
him behind a crate on the dock.
Hurston’s tale explores the irrepressible high-
life of Harlem and urban northern communities. It
also considers the stresses of modern American
domesticity.
Bibliography
Jones, Sharon. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race,
Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora
Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West.Westport Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 2002.
Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance.Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
My Great Wide Beautiful WorldJuanita
Harrison(1936)
A colorful travel memoir by JUANITAHARRISON,a
Mississippi-born domestic who financed her world
tour by working throughout the United States. She
left the United States in 1927, aged 36, for a series
of voyages and expeditions that included stops in
Egypt, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Spain,
Turkey, and Hong Kong. After an immensely satis-
fying odyssey, during which she lived in 22 coun-
tries, Harrison settled in Hawaii in April 1935.
Harrison published portions of the text in the
October and November 1935 issues of THEAT-
LANTICMONTHLY.One year later, the book was
published by the MACMILLANCOMPANY.
Harrison’s title was inspired by a poem by W. B.
Rands that contemplated the glory of the world and
its far-flung and welcoming lands. She reprinted
two stanzas of Rands’s poem on the frontispiece of
her book. The lines began, “Great, wide, beautiful,
wonderful World, / With the wonderful water
round you curled, /And the wonderful grass upon
your breast, / World, you are beautifully dressed.”
Mildred Morris provided an informative pref-
ace to Harrison’s impressive travelogue and mem-
oir. Morris was the daughter of Mrs. Felix Morris,
for whom Harrison worked temporarily while in
France. Morris provides the only known descrip-
tions of Harrison, whom she describes as “an Amer-
ican colored woman, who undertook, at the age of
thirty-six, to work her way around the world.” She
lost some $800 in savings when a Denver bank
failed. Shortly thereafter, an employer and real es-
tate broker named Mr. Dickinson invested her
earnings and accumulated for her an annual in-
come of $200. Harrison used that money to finance
her travels. Morris notes that Harrison “[f]re-
quently... adopted the garb of the country she vis-
ited and was accepted as a native. Her slight form,
fresh olive complexion, long hair braided about her
head, made her appear younger than her years.”
The work was reprinted in 1996 with an intro-
duction by Adele Logan Alexander.Bibliography
Harrison, Juanita. My Great Wide Beautiful World.1937,
reprint, New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.360 My Great Wide Beautiful World