peared in The Crisisin 1912–13, “Hope Deferred”
focuses on the ambitions of an engineer, a talented
man who is denied employment because of his race.
Dunbar-Nelson chronicles the agonizing downward
spiral of Louis Edwards, a newlywed man who is
forced to become a strikebreaker and waiter in
order to survive. The tragedy of the story is intensi-
fied because of Edwards’s marriage to Margaret, a
gentle, kind, and loving woman. The narrator de-
scribes him as a young man, “so young that he had
not outgrown his ideals. Rather than allow that to
happen, he had chosen one to share them with
him, and the man who can find a woman willing to
face poverty for her husband’s ideals has a treasure
far above rubies, and more precious than one with a
thorough understanding of domestic science.”
Edwards begins working at Adams’s restaurant,
an establishment owned by a man who “should
have been rubicund, corpulent, American; instead
he was wiry, lank, foreign in appearance.” Adams
hires Edwards, and the young husband motivates
the staff in the face of violent protest from the
striking workers who picket the restaurant. On one
fateful day, however, Edwards has to serve Hanan,
the man who most recently refused to consider his
application for an engineering post. Eventually, the
white man looks up and recognizes Edwards. He
comments that Edwards has found “work for which
[he] would be more fitted than engineering.” Ed-
wards manages to restrain himself, but at that very
moment, a stone shatters the restaurant window. It
hits the serving tray that Edwards is holding, and
hot food spills onto Hanan. The catalyst for the
event goes unnoticed as Hanan insults Edwards,
and the two begin to fight. Edwards is arrested and
sentenced to prison. The story closes as Margaret
visits him and reassures him of her love and intent
to wait for him to be free. Her last words to him,
and the final scene of the story, deliver a romantic
vision of the South, one that repudiates the false
promise that the urban North extends to African
Americans. Margaret Edwards counsels her hus-
band to maintain his idealism and reminds him that
his prison window “faces the South.... Look up
and out of it all the while you are here,” she ad-
vises. “[I]t is there, in our southland, that you will
find the realization of your dream,” she says.
Dunbar-Nelson’s story addresses the segre-
gated and divisive working world of the urban
North during the early 20th century. It is a memo-
rable comment on the realities of the Great Migra-
tion and a compelling meditation on the limits of
assimilation, domestic hardships, and the denigra-
tion of talented African Americans.Bibliography
Hull, Gloria, ed. Color, Sex, & Poetry: Three Women Writ-
ers of the Harlem Renaissance.Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987.
———. The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988.Horne, Frank S.(1899–1974)
An optometrist by training who published award-
winning poetry in leading Harlem Renaissance
journals and anthologies. He was part of the vi-
brant WASHINGTON, D.C., and NEWYORKCITY
literary circles and collaborated with accomplished
writers such as GEORGIADOUGLASJOHNSON.
Horne was born in New York City in August
1899 to Edwin and Cora Calhoun Horne. He at-
tended the College of the City of New York and
graduated in 1921. He excelled in sports and was
extremely proud of the fact that he was a varsity
track athlete. Although he admitted that he “had a
hankering to write” from a very early age, it was in
college that he began to write seriously. In the auto-
biographical note that he published in CAROLING
DUSK(1927), the poetry anthology that included
several of his poems, Horne admitted that it was
during college that he had became “guilty... of my
first sonnet.” He credited CHARLESS. JOHNSON,
editor of OPPORTUNITY, and GWENDOLYN BEN-
NETT, poet and cultural critic, for encouraging him
to publish.
Horne obtained his doctor of ophthalmology
degree from Northern Illinois College of Ophthal-
mology in 1923. Immediately after graduation and
until 1926, Horne practiced ophthalmology in New
York City and in CHICAGO. He also pursued addi-
tional studies at COLUMBIAUNIVERSITYfrom 1929
to 1930 and earned a master’s degree from the Uni-
versity of Southern California in 1932. He began
teaching, and his administrative career in educa-
tion began shortly thereafter. Soon after he joined
the faculty at Fort Valley Normal and Industrial
School in Fort Valley, Georgia, he was appointedHorne, Frank S. 247