From the moment of enslavement, and throughout the entire tragic history of slavery, the one driving aspiration shaping the life experiences of slaves was the desire to be free men and women. Irrespective of where and when they lived as slaves, the dream of freedom for themselves and their families, however difficult or unlikely that may have been, was at the forefront of their objectives as human beings. When the real possibilities of acquiring freedom were remote and improbable, slaves asserted their humanity and insisted upon being treated with respect and dignity in the most adverse of all human conditions. Despite their dreadful positions as chattel, slaves struggled to negotiate the terms of their daily lives, even within the confines of slavery. They were not passive victims of oppression but sought to exert as much control as possible over their lives in a wide variety of ways. This aspect of the slave experience should not be glamorized or romanticized. In most cases, despite their efforts, intentions, and hopes, slaves were cruelly treated, separated from family members, abused in a variety of ways, and were unable to mitigate the basic conditions of brutality that governed their lives.

That, however, does not mean that they simply accepted perpetual servitude and the inevitable abuse and degradation that accompanied enslavement. Slaves sought to shape their lives to the greatest degree possible and demanded as much respect as could be extracted from masters, overseers, free workers who sometimes labored alongside them, and their fellow slaves.

The word “slavery” inevitably conjures up a series of images: the cotton-picking slave of the U.S. South; the sugar cane–cutting slave gangs of the Caribbean and Brazil; and perhaps the domestic servants or house slaves present in all slave societies. These may be accurate for particular places during specific periods, but they are only partially indicative of the slave experience in the Americas. This is because of the extraordinary diversity of what it meant to be a slave in different epochs and regions. The patterns of daily life for a slave laboring on the Texas cotton frontier in the 1840s were dramatically different from those of a slave working in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake region, or a slave living in urban Richmond, Virginia. Aside from the horrifying and degrading reality of being treated and regarded as property – a powerful communality, no doubt – it is important to recognize that slavery was a complex institution with enormous variations as it developed and evolved regionally in the Americas from the early sixteenth century until slavery was finally abolished in Brazil in 1888. Despite popular perceptions and imagery, there are few generalizations about the slave experience that may be universally applied. Before turning to the comparative histories of slavery in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, a summary of slavery's development in the Americas is needed so that slavery in these nations may be understood in its proper historical context.

New World slavery has been observed and analyzed from a variety of perspectives in thousands of published volumes in numerous languages. These date from Columbus's voyages of the 1490s, which opened the Americas to European colonization and initiated the transatlantic African slave trade. Yet, despite sympathy or disdain, intimate contact or distance in space and time, and regardless of academic discipline or methodological approach, few observers, present or past, have been able to answer the fundamental, and clearly horrific, question of what it was like to live one's life as a slave. This is a daunting task, and it would hardly be daring to suggest that no one except a slave, of any race or sex regardless of sensitivity or empathy, could possibly answer this query. Only slaves themselves had the ability to convey an accurate portrayal of their sufferings, pains, degradations, struggles, hopes, aspirations, joys, and sorrows. Through their written records, we now will “listen” to slaves speak about various aspects of their experience. These testimonies will provide the most valuable insights into their lives, for the following chapters of this book will use historical sources produced by others to map out various parameters governing slave life. Yet we must keep in mind the points made in the previous chapter.

The ability of slaves to carve out prerogatives for themselves, while a real and important aspect of the slave experience, ought not to be exaggerated. Despite the fact that space sometimes existed for negotiating some of the terms of servitude, the power of masters could be arbitrary, capricious, and ultimately abusive and degrading. Slaves were sometimes punished for imagined offenses and could suffer terrible consequences for indiscretions perceived or real. They could be whipped, manacled, confined in horrifying physical conditions, and deprived of contact with loved ones. Wives, daughters, mothers, lovers could be sexually abused by masters or their sons, and there was little recourse for slaves to act or protest without risking the worst consequences. In the end, slaves had little power over the most basic elements of their lives and were subject to the absolute and total control of their owners and the governmental powers that stood behind the slaveholding class. Desperation at the inability to determine the most basic aspects of existence often led to varied forms of resistance to servitude and sometimes spontaneous or organized rebellions and conspiracies to achieve freedom.

Resistance was ongoing and fundamental to the slave experience in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. The most common form was simply to run away – individually, with family members, or with co-conspirators. This was a common occurrence, although men were overwhelmingly the great majority of slaves who ran away.

The African slave trade and slavery were among the great human tragedies in the development of the Americas. There were few colonies or nations founded by European powers where slaves of African descent were not found in significant numbers at some point in their histories. The institution of slavery and forced labor in one form or another was a part of all cultures – African, Asian, European, and in the indigenous societies of the Americas prior to European colonization. But it was only in the Americas that slavery developed as an institution based upon race. Although indigenous peoples were first enslaved by Spanish and Portuguese conquerors during the prolonged processes of discovery, conquest, and colonization initiated by the Columbus voyages of the late fifteenth century, by the 1550s only those of African descent could be enslaved according to legal codes. Scholars have debated why race-based slavery developed in the Americas on such a pervasive scale after 1500. They have arrived at the generalized conclusion that the European colonial powers became reluctant to enslave peoples who were racially similar to themselves, even though this had been the case for centuries within nearly all European cultures. Africans were so unlike Europeans from racial, religious, and cultural perspectives that it became morally and politically acceptable to enslave them. All kinds of philosophical and religious reasons were constructed by Europeans to justify the exclusive enslavement of peoples of African descent.

Many people have considered the work of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes to represent two antagonistic strands of Harlem Renaissance thinking about the role of the black artist, the nature of African American literature, and indeed whether something called “Negro Literature” existed. It is unquestionably true that the two poets themselves to some extent felt such an antagonism, as seen most famously in Hughes' 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” that began with a sort of racial syllogism attributed to an unnamed Negro poet in which the statement “I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet” becomes “I would like to be white.” While Hughes does not name the poet, the opening premise of this syllogism closely resembles a statement Cullen made during a 1924 interview in which he declared, “if I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.”

Hughes, too, is well known as the progenitor of a new black vernacular lyric poetry, particularly the genre of blues poetry, while the statement “White folks is white” in the first line of Cullen's “Uncle Jim” represents practically the entirety of his published verse directly utilizing some version of a distinctly African American idiom.

Dramatists of the Harlem Renaissance (c. 1916-35) sought to eradicate the legacy of minstrelsy. American minstrelsy began in the late 1820s and consisted in white actors applying burnt cork to their faces in degrading portrayals of African Americans. This created a cultural lexicon of stereotypes. Eliminating the century-long shroud of minstrel theater became one of the goals of Harlem Renaissance dramatists. Willis Richardson, author of the first African American non-musical drama on Broadway, said in 1919 that “When I say Negro plays, I do not mean merely plays with Negro characters,” but dramas portraying “the soul of a people.” Indeed, it was part of the “New Negro” agenda to lay bear the “people's soul.” Plays conveyed the principles of the “New Negro” by portraying characters having moral values, familial bonds, education, dignity, integrity, and work ethic. “Negro life,” Alain Locke noted in his “Introduction” to the era's influential The New Negro (1925), “is not only establishing new contacts and founding centers, it is finding a new soul.”

Creating the New Negro “soul” onstage, however, proved no simple undertaking. Several factors had to be considered, among them: how should blacks be portrayed - with idealization or bluntness; and what was drama's function - to protest racism or to convey the ordinary folk? James Weldon Johnson added in 1928 that the African American author “faces a special problem which the plain American author knows nothing about - the problem of the double audience; it is a divided audience, an audience made up of two elements with differing and often opposite and antagonistic points of view.”

When an author's work is taught in colleges, and produced for television (by Oprah Winfrey), and her face graces postage stamps, coffee mugs, calendars, notecards, and refrigerator magnets, it is a safe bet that her status, in popular culture at least, is secure. Because so many of my friends and colleagues have bought them for me, I happen to own a great many Zora Neale Hurston finger puppet refrigerator magnets - complete with floppy hat, purple dress, pearl necklace, and “Magnetic Personalities” data card. Of the four dozen or so figures marketed in the magnet's celebrity series, Hurston is the only one identified by first name alone. This is not insignificant. Hurston has become a national celebrity and a folk heroine, as Sheffey's proclamation, quoted above, attests. Her intimacy with the shared heritage of folk traditions no doubt contributes to this sense that “Zora” is our familiar, someone we can approach on a first-name basis and imagine as our own. But, as I will suggest, there are myriad ironies involved in making Hurston into a folk heroine, not least of them being her own highly complex relation to the folk traditions she documented and referenced in almost everything that she wrote. This chapter, then, returns to some of Hurston's use of the folklore she collected to rethink the ways in which we have imagined her relationship to it.

The most notorious bad review of the Harlem Renaissance peaks with an upset stomach and an itch for soap. In an installment of his regular “Browsing Reader” column in The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois accused Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) of being nasty, brutish, too long, and largely unhygienic. “[F]or the most part,” Du Bois confessed, McKay's bestselling novel “nauseates me, and after the dirtiest parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Several features of Home to Harlem inspired this unusually embodied instance of reader response criticism. The novel fed the lechery of debased white bohemians, charged Du Bois, a smart set eager to project its own fantasies of “utter licentiousness” onto “black Harlem,” and powerful enough within the New York publishing industry to do so in wide public view. McKay satisfied this small but influential constituency for transracial pornography with rare skill, Du Bois allowed, summoning “every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.” Yet gilding the lily of decadence did not make for lean, harmoniously integrated fiction. Home to Harlem was “padded,” deprived of a logical plot or “any artistic unity.” It cried out for a well-wrought, well-scrubbed sequel free from a “dirty subject” and supplied with a “strong, well-knit as well as beautiful theme.” Before any such sequel was forthcoming, Du Bois' review inspired a blistering private letter from McKay. Questioning the elder statesman's basic credentials as a critic and author of mimetic fiction, McKay mockingly pitied Du Bois' removal from “real life” forced by his role as a racial advocate.

The Caribbean

Claude McKay and Eric Walrond have long been regarded as important figures of the Harlem Renaissance. They were not African Americans, however. McKay, born in Jamaica, and Walrond, born in present-day Guyana and raised in Barbados and Panama, were part of a large contingent of migrants from the Caribbean who came to the USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their Caribbean origins had a profound influence on their attitude toward American race relations as well as on their literary development.

The impact of Caribbean immigrants on the Harlem Renaissance was widely noted at the time. As early as 1919, the editor Fenton Johnson wrote that “We of America owe much to the West Indian . . . In every field of American life we find the West Indian pushing ahead and doing all in his power to uphold the dignity of the Negro race.” Yet there has been a tendency to subsume writers like McKay and Walrond into the American canon without taking full account of their Caribbean origins. There is a need to reclaim them for Caribbean literary history and to see them as precursors of major contemporary writers such as Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat, who were born in the Caribbean but have lived in the USA for much of their writing lives.

In his last novel, Banana Bottom (1933), Claude McKay described the beginning of the twentieth century in Jamaica as a period of “inquietude” (45). That was somewhat of an understatement. Jamaica and other British colonies in the Caribbean were undergoing profound social, economic, and political upheavals that would contribute to the massive migration that took place from the 1890s to the 1920s.

Elaborately costumed crossdressers at Harlem drag balls, public wedding ceremonies for black lesbian couples, speakeasies entertaining racially and sexually mixed crowds with illicit drinks and sexually explicit performances - transgressive sexuality clearly represented a visible facet of life during the Harlem Renaissance. This glossy and racy image of Harlem fits the sexualized cliché of the “roaring twenties” as a decade of abandon and sexual revolution. Dramatic changes in the urban sexual and racial landscapes indeed occurred in the early twentieth century: thousands of African Americans migrated to the northern urban centers, the “New Woman” emerged, and same-sex desire was reconceptualized. Until then explained by the phenomenon of gender inversion - effeminate men desire other men and “mannish” women desire other women - and represented by easily identifiable “inverts,” types such as “fairies”/“pansies” or “mannish-acting” women, same-sex desire was now increasingly linked to a discrete and less visible category: homosexuality. Older theories of same-sex interest as inextricably linked to gender inversion, however, persisted. While the police and urban anti-vice societies attempted to suppress “immoral” sexual activities, New York's freshly emerged metropolis Harlem was largely exempt from policing efforts and consequently developed into a popular vice district. Striving for racial uplift, the black bourgeoisie tried to counteract this development by exerting pressure on the black community, but they lacked the power to successfully police Harlem.

Critics of the Harlem Renaissance often pair Nella Larsen with Jessie Fauset, but Nella Larsen and Rudolph Fisher make a better literary pair than do Fauset and Larsen. Like Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman, both Larsen and Fisher believed that sexual desire is a primary force in human nature but one shaped by the ubiquitous presence of modernity. One manifestation of modernity, of course, is popular culture - cabarets, film, and pulp fiction. And as modernists, Larsen and Fisher saw that popular culture was a source of modernism, especially American modernism. For instance, as murder mysteries, Larsen's Passing (1929) and Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies (1932) are indebted to a modernist conception that a lowbrow literary genre like a detective novel might reveal, in Raymond Chandler's famous phrase, a “hidden truth.” In Quicksand (1928), Larsen makes use of another aspect of popular culture (both cinematic and literary), the sensational story of the “tragic mulatta,” but her allusion to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) reinterprets that story as an examination of love in a post World War I universe. Finally, in Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies, the clue to the murderer's identity lies not in rational analysis (which presupposes Newtonian order) but in a comic blues song about sexual desire heard daily on Harlem's streets. Echoing Plato's Symposium, all three novels treat sexual desire as the engine in the human machine that can either destroy the self or create the possibility for transcendence, either personal or communal.

Our contemporary celebration of African American culture, especially our concern for “authentic” blackness and the vernacular, owes much to the New Negro era. From Hip Hop, to movies depicting black inner city life, to spokenword poetry, to “Chitlin' Circuit” theater, and beyond, black folk expression (either rural or urban) has come to serve as the sign of black cultural identity. Yet the centrality of the vernacular was not always evident in the longer history of African American letters. To be sure, the vernacular has always held a place in African American literary expression, but through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries standard English and Anglo-American literary models were the norm (indeed the ideal for many) in addressing both African American and white audiences. It was the Harlem Renaissance that radically relocated the folk, indeed reinvented an African American literary vocabulary based on folk forms, idioms, and patterns of speech; and in doing so, the Harlem Renaissance bequeathed a legacy that would shape African American literature throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day.

The legacy of Harlem Renaissance artistry begins in the larger context of the New Negro Movement, the late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century political and cultural movement to reclaim the civil rights guaranteed through Reconstruction legislation. The New Negro generation created political organizations, published magazines and newspapers, attended colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers, and pursued professional careers all in the name of African American equality, inclusion, and full citizenship.

One of the effects of the Harlem Renaissance was to bring people of disparate backgrounds together in common cause. Such was the case with George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman, two of the era's major satirists. Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1895 and raised in Syracuse, New York. He started writing while serving in the United States Army and moved on to a long and controversial career that lasted until his death in 1977. Wallace Thurman was born (1902) and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah; he was educated at both the University of Utah and the University of Southern California before coming to New York City in 1925. Thurman's career was both exceptional and tragically short; he died of tuberculosis in 1934. Despite their different backgrounds, both writers ended up moving in important Harlem Renaissance literary and intellectual circles from 1925 onwards. By the same token, both Schuyler and Thurman ended up adopting significant and very complex roles as intellectual champions of some of the movement's prime ideals and as satirical excoriators on the age's foibles and excesses. Thurman and Schuyler took seriously the discussions of race and culture that circulated all around them, but they refused to see the major social and aesthetic concerns of the time as anything that could be easily understood, corrected, or improved. Their interventions into the political and artistic discourses of the 1920s and 30s were meant to counteract the romanticization of Harlem at that time and provide for their readers a healthy skepticism toward issues of race, color, nationalism, and conformism.

In 1945 the editors of the Atlanta University journal Phylon wrote to a sixty-five-year-old Carl Van Vechten and asked for his comments on a Hugh Gloster essay they were publishing. Gloster's “The Van Vechten Vogue” sketched out the influence of the best-known white American - half architect, half voyeur - connected to the explosion of black writing in the 1920s. Phylon's editors, the sharp-minded young sociologist Ira de a Reid and the illustrious W.E. B. Du Bois, printed Van Vechten's brief comment. According to the man who had been the leading light of the “Negrotarians,” the white cultivators and supporters committed to the exploration of black life in Manhattan in the 1920s, Gloster was so “eminently fair” in his essay that nothing was left to say. The novelist, photographer, and spirited collector of African American letters could not avoid the fact that he was seeing something that he had predicted would end certain varieties of discrimination. “Negroes are kept down because they lack NERVE and initiative,” Van Vechten had written to his friend Langston Hughes in 1942. Gloster showed both qualities, hallmarks of a new generation of writers and critics, a cadre that would rely considerably less on the support of individual patrons like Van Vechten. He was a man whose era had passed and whose most deeply held convictions about racial equality led the way to the vastly reduced scope of his own role.

In his essay, Gloster targeted not even so much Van Vechten singly as the entire movement during which Van Vechten's most famous relationships with Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neal Hurston, and Nella Larsen, among many others, had flourished. In an unusually ironic twist of fate, the movement for black artistic development in the United States, always hand-in-glove with the larger movement for racial justice, and the even broader shift for modernist artistic expression, seemed deliberately employing segregationist logic in its historical self-representation.

In 1923, amongst the many reviews of Jean Toomer's Cane, came two of very contrasting opinion. Disdaining “certain innovators who conceive language to be little more than a series of ejaculatory spasms,” the Minneapolis Journal suggested “if the Negro (and the south) is to become really articulate its new writers must seek better models than those Mr Toomer follows.” In contrast, the African American critic Montgomery Gregory, writing in the first issue of Opportunity, soon to become the pre-eminent forum for the incipient New Negro Renaissance, waxed more lyrical:

Despite their differences in opinion, these reviews nonetheless shared the evaluative criteria that characterized the reaction to Cane - and determined its importance - both in 1923 and in most of the subsequent (and voluminous) criticism devoted to it. Both were concerned with the effectiveness of the formal innovations and formal eclecticism of the work; with how well Jean Toomer had found either a voice or an “aesthetic equivalent” for the South; and to what degree Toomer was a “representative man,” a figurehead and a model for subsequent African American writing.

The Harlem Renaissance – what a complex and conflicted aura the term evokes! People can scarcely agree on what it means. A vogue. A blossoming. A failure. A foundation. A few stars. A movement of black self-assertion against white supremacy, connected with anticolonial movements worldwide, or a local phenomenon gradually co-opted and destroyed by white voyeurs, cultural colonialists taking advantage of black naifs, opportunists, or weak-kneed bourgeois artists. A post hoc invention of cultural historians, now abundantly exploited by publishers, New York tour guides, and even, of late, real estate investors.

What is commonly called the Harlem Renaissance today was known as the Negro Renaissance in its own time. “Negro”: a word of pride, of strong vowels and a capital N. The thick diagonal strode forward and put its foot down. “Negro” no longer signifies to most people what it did in the early to mid-twentieth century. A Spanish derivative, it did not exactly mean “Black” in American English – it was sui generis, a word only used to indicate persons of the slightest (non-“white”) sub-Saharan African descent, regardless of color, but it seized on the essential meaning of the metaphor of the one mighty “drop [of blood]” that made one “black.” Racial segregation was racing toward its apogee. Race was the word of the hour. Race suicide. Race purity. Race man. Race woman. The Passing of the Great Race. “Arise, O Mighty Race!” Enter the New Negro.