play is set in the Seventh Avenue apartment of
Corinne, a light-skinned woman who has cultivated
numerous male sweethearts and providers. One
evening, however, her usually choreographed dal-
liances begin to go haywire, and she is forced to deal
with a seemingly unpredictable and unrelenting flow
of male callers. Each man brings her expensive
items, and the treats range from expensive shoes to
rent money. Finally, her policeman beau is alerted to
the possibility that she has criminals lurking on the
balcony outside her window. In the mayhem that
ensues, all six of the men whom she has staged in
various places in her apartment are revealed to each
other. Dismayed by Corinne’s treachery, they re-
trieve their gifts and abandon her.
Yellow Peril,whose title invokes the colloquial
and mildly pejorative phrase “high yaller” that de-
notes light-skinned people, appeared in the Jan-
uary 1925 issue of THEMESSENGER.
Bibliography
Leak, Jeffrey. Rac(e)ing to the Right: Selected Essays of
George S. Schuyler.Knoxville: University of Ten-
nessee Press, 2001.
Peplow, Michael. George S. Schuyler.Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1980.
Williams, Harry. When Black Is Right: The Life and Writ-
ings of George S. Schuyler.Ann Arbor, Mich.: Uni-
versity Microfilms International, 1990.
York Beach Jean Toomer(1929)
A truncated version of a novel that JEANTOOMER
intended to complete. First entitled Istil,the novel
was influenced significantly by Toomer’s own experi-
ences as an aspiring writer. The protagonist Nathan
Antrum, whose name itself recalls Toomer’s own
Christian name, comes to terms with life and his
own desires as a writer. In 1929, with the help of
Paul Rosenfeld, who also featured in the novel,
Toomer published a 70-page version of the work.
Bibliography
Kerman, Cynthia Earl, and Richard Eldridge. The Lives
of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness.Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
You Can’t Pet a PossumArna Bontemps
and Langston Hughes(1934)
A story for children that ARNA BONTEMPS
cowrote with LANGSTON HUGHES. The story,
which featured a child named Shine Boy and his
hound named Butch, was published by William
Morrow in 1934, two years after the successful
children’s book POPO ANDFIFINA:CHILDREN OF
HAITI (1932), also cowritten by Bontemps and
Hughes. The work also appeared some two years
before Bontemps completed his powerful historical
novel, BLACK THUNDER (1936), based on the
slave revolt led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800. Yo u
Can’t Pet a Possumwas one of several works for
children that Bontemps published during his
lengthy and successful career. His commitment to
providing absorbing literature for young readers
was inspired by his desire both to write and to pro-
vide delightful and unfettered imaginative stories
for his six children and many others.Bibliography
Jones, Kirkland C. Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Bi-
ography of Arna Wendell Bontemps.Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1992.Young, Nathan Benjamin(1894–1993)
Young published sporadically during the Harlem
Renaissance, but his work garnered critical atten-
tion and praise. In the first literary contest spon-
sored by OPPORTUNITY, Young saw two of his
works honored. “THE BOLL WEEVIL STARTS
NORTH” won first honorable mention, and “All
God’s Chillun Got Shoes” earned a sixth-place
honorable mention. In 1927 Young competed in
THECRISISliterary contest and was one of several
writers, among them JOHNMATHEUSand RAN-
DOLPHEDMONDS, who earned honorable mention
for their entries.
Limited autobiographical information in the
periodicals that published his work makes it diffi-
cult to confirm Young’s background. It is possible
that he was in fact, Nathan Benjamin Young, Jr., a
Tuskegee, Alabama, native who graduated from
Yale Law School in 1918, became a forceful orga-
nizer in Birmingham, Alabama, for the NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION FOR THEADVANCEMENT OFCOL-
OREDPEOPLE(NAACP), and then relocated with
his wife to St. Louis, Missouri. In St. Louis, that
figure became the first African-American munici-
pal judge, and he founded the St. Louis American,
a weekly African-American newspaper, and served
as publisher and frequent contributor for more572 York Beach