(Locke changed the title to “White Houses” in
order not to offend his audience) to the more cel-
ebratory “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Hughes
and “The Creation” by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON.
The second section is devoted to nonfiction essays
that look forward with optimism and excitement
for the future. Both the general positive tone and
the tension provided by McKay and DuBois’s piece
“The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” from the second
section, rounds out the anthology, which ends with
a diverse bibliography listing important works in
literature and music.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Alain LeRoy Locke.” The Black Renaissance in Wash-
ington. District of Columbia Public Library.
Available online. URL: http://www.dclibrary.org/
blkren/bios/lockea.html. Accessed October 18,
2006.
Hayden, Robert. “Preface to the Atheneum Edition.”
In The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke New
York: Atheneum, 1968.
Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” In The New Negro,
edited by Alain Locke, 3–16. New York: Macmil-
lan, 1925.
Kim Hai Pearson Brian Jennings
Nigger Heaven Carl Van Vechten (1926)
At its publication, CARL VAN VECHTEN’s Nigger
Heaven proved both a central text of the HARLEM
RENAISSANCE and a lightning rod for controversy.
Despite some positive reviews from both white
and black writers, it was seen very quickly as “bad
form” among blacks to be caught reading the novel,
and both Van Vechten and his text received blister-
ing receptions in Harlem and elsewhere within the
black community. W. E. B. DUBOIS wrote that it
was “a blow in the face... an affront to the hos-
pitality of black folk and to the intelligence of
white.... It is not a true picture of Harlem life....
It is caricature... an astonishing and wearisome
hodgepodge of laboriously stated facts, quota-
tions, and expressions, illuminated here and there
with something that comes near to being noth-
ing but cheap melodrama” (vii). Likewise, ALAIN
LOCKE and COUNTEE CULLEN despised the novel,
though neither said so publicly (Lewis, 181). Peti-
tions were circulated to ban the book in New York,
especially in public libraries. The Pittsburgh Cou-
rier instituted a moratorium on ads for the book,
which was lifted only after the direct intervention
of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCE-
MENT OF COLORED PEOPLE’s WALTER WHITE. Oth-
ers were less reticent. In December 1926 pages of
the novel were burned by Professor S. R. Williams
at a Harlem meeting to protest recent lynchings
(Worth, 466).
The novel that occasioned this vitriol was di-
vided into two books and a prologue introducing
highly exoticized Harlem characters. Byron Kas-
son, oozing with literary ambitions and precious
little actual effort, finds himself unable to obtain
work as a writer and fails equally when forced to
take what he sees as a demeaning job as an elevator
operator. Byron ignites the passion of Mary Love,
an overly refined and repressed librarian, who finds
herself passed over for promotion by less qualified
white peers. Mary spends her time worrying if she
is sufficiently black. Byron eventually abandons
the virtuous Mary for the notorious Harlem heir-
ess Lasca Sartoris, who dallies with him and then
tosses him aside. The novel ends where it began, in
a nightclub populated by pimps, prostitutes, and
bootleggers, but with the final twist of a crime of
passion, for which Byron is framed.
For this grossly primitive and exotic depiction,
Van Vechten was denounced as a voyeur of Har-
lem’s rich black culture, though a few praised him
for his brave foregrounding of black themes and
characters. Referring to himself as a “Nordic strug-
gling with Ethiopian psychology,” Van Vechten did
offer one of the first novels set in urban America
peopled with African-American characters, as
well as the complicating reality of a white author
writing as a champion for blacks. Yet he seemed
ambiguous about his own motivation, and his
ambivalence may help explain why the novel is, as
charged, saturated in the exotic and the primitive.
While the primitive dominates, anything seen
as lower class and black is brutally rejected. AdoraNigger Heaven 395