come from pity.” Dejected by Flo’s refusal, Red Boy
leaves for some two years.
When Red Boy eventually returns to the
North, he finds Flo to be a changed woman. No
longer the “Wild Blood” and outspoken person that
he knew, she instead seems like a “wild, helpless
thing like a thistle blowed to pieces—a wild, help-
less thing lak a spirit chained to earth.” She is
devastated by the tattered, but nevertheless illumi-
nating, scrap of paper on which her mother has
recorded the circumstances of her child’s birth. The
now-pregnant Flo, who has married a Moroccan in
an effort to preserve her supposedly unbroken link
to Africa, is devastated to learn that she is the
product of a rape that occurred when her en-
slaved mother was attacked by her owner. Flo
stays on with Red Boy until the birth of her child.
Before she dies, Flo instructs her lifelong friend to
tell her daughter that she has royal blood. He re-
sists at first, and when, 20 years later, he finds
Flo’s child, it is clear that she is proud of her
identity and not at all in need of a vexed and elu-
sive African genealogy.
To Make a Poet Black J. Saunders Redding
(1939)
Published by poet, teacher, and writer J. SAUNDERS
REDDING,To Make a Poet Blackis a significant con-
tribution to American literary history. Redding
proposed that his book was a “study of the litera-
ture of... dark Americans” and that such a criti-
cal enterprise was “a practical, as opposed to a
purely speculative exercise.” He asserted the im-
pressive link between race and literature, noting
that “no one who studies even superficially the his-
tory of the Negro in America can fail to see the
uncommon relationship of his letters to that his-
tory” and that “from the very beginning the litera-
ture of the Negro has been literature either of
purpose or necessity.” Redding examined the
works of writers such as Jupiter Hammon, Phillis
Wheatley, Charles Remond, Frances Harper, Paul
Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. DUBOIS. In his
final chapter, entitled “Emergence of the New
Negro,” Redding examined the works of Harlem
Renaissance era writers such as JESSIEFAUSET,
RUDOLPH FISHER,JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,
and others.
Redding’s volume is invaluable for its steady
and insightful appraisal of African-American liter-
ature and its efforts to advance the formal African-
American tradition of literary criticism.Bibliography
Redding, J. Saunders. To Make a Poet Black. 1939;
reprint, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1988.
Berry, Faith, ed. A Scholar’s Conscience: Selected Writings
of K. Saunders Redding, 1942–1977.Lexington: Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky, 1992.Tom-TomShirley Graham DuBois(1929)
A music-drama by SHIRLEY GRAHAM DUBOIS,
considered by many scholars to be the first opera
written by an African-American woman. Graham
completed the work while she was a sophomore at
Oberlin College. In 1932, three years after its first
production, the work was debuted in Cleveland,
Ohio. Organized by the Cleveland Opera Company
and staged at the Cleveland Stadium in Ohio, it
starred Jules Bledsoe in the title role.Bibliography
Horne, Gerald. The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois.New
York: New York University Press, 2000.Toomer, Nathan Eugene (Jean)
(1894–1967)
One of the most enigmatic writers of the Harlem
Renaissance, Toomer produced lyrical documen-
tary fiction, plays, and poetry and was known for
his philosophical considerations, spiritual pursuits,
and complicated perspectives on race and its im-
pact on the Harlem Renaissance.
Born in WASHINGTON, D.C., he was the son of
Nathan and Nina Pinchback Toomer. Toomer’s im-
mediate and extended family were of mixed race,
and this ancestry impacted his own self-definition
and politics. Nathan Toomer, who may have been
born free, was the child of a mixed-race woman and
a white Georgia planter. Jean Toomer’s maternal
grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback,
was of mixed-race ancestry, too, the son of Eliza
Stewart, an enslaved mulatto woman, and her
white master. Pinchback became a member of theToomer, Nathan Eugene (Jean) 523