Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance

desire to have a career on the stage, writes to say
that she will visit her friend whom she has not seen
in some 12 years. Unfortunately, Margaret’s father
passes away before she arrives. The narrator has,
however, inadvertently given the hospital Mar-
garet’s home address in response to their request
for information about next-of-kin. She hopes that
Margaret has left home before the message arrives
and vows not to spoil the Christmas holiday by
telling her friend this sad news on the first evening
that she arrives. The two are reunited with much
enthusiasm, and the narrator is convinced that her
friend has not been informed about her father’s
death. That night they share a delightful and fes-
tive evening together. “I shall never forget our
happy evening,” promises the narrator. “She was
like a sprite, never still. She fell in love with small
Margaret. Once she said fiercely to the shining
faces [of the children], ‘Be happy. Let nothing
stand in the way of your being happy.’” Later that
night, the two women prepare for bed having rele-
gated the narrator’s husband to a cot downstairs.
Margaret opens her suitcase and takes out a black
dress that she intends to wear to the funeral. The
narrator is dumbfounded by what is revealed to
have been Margaret’s impressive performance. “My
throat went dry,” she recalls. “For the first time in
my life I was going to sleep with a stranger.”
West’s brief story conveys well the kind of per-
formance and deception that can shatter illusions
of domestic harmony and notions of true friend-
ship. It is in keeping with her other stories that ex-
plore the nature of family relationships and the
strong-willed women who survive the most trying,
and potentially devastating, of circumstances.

Blacker the Berry, TheWallace Thurman
(1929)
A compelling meditation on intraracial color con-
sciousness, this novel on the African-American
middle class generated critical acclaim for its au-
thor WALLACETHURMAN. He explored the psy-
chological, emotional, and financial effects of color
prejudice as practiced within the black community.
Over the course of the novel’s five sections,
entitled “Emma Lou,” “Harlem,” “Alva,” “Rent
Party,” and “Pyrrhic Victory,” respectively, Emma
Lou, the darkest-skinned child in an emphatically

light-skinned family, suffers exclusion, alienation,

and dismissal in and beyond her own family. The

novel begins with a character who has a promising

sense of herself as she takes part in her high school

graduation but is a woman under siege. “More

acutely than ever before Emma Lou began to feel

that her luscious black complexion was somewhat

of a liability,” notes the narrator, “and that her

marked color variation from the other people in

her environment was a decided curse.” The child

of a light-skinned mother and “old black Jim Mor-

gan,” her dark-skinned father, Emma Lou is ren-

dered the “alien member of the family and of the

family’s social circle” and has to endure a “moan-

ing and grieving over the color of her skin.” She is

Blacker the Berry, The 39

Cover illustration by Aaron Douglas of Wallace

Thurman’s 1929 novel, The Blacker the Berry,

Macauley Company (Yale Collection of American

Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)