Until the US stock market crashed on October 24, 1929, Harlem Renaissance writing had been overwhelmingly focused on the emergence of “the New Negro” from the “Negro migration, northward and city-ward… from the cotton-field and farm to the heart of the most complex urban civilization” (Locke 629–30). But between the Crash in 1929 and the Harlem Race Riot of March 19, 1935, four important novels were published by Harlem Renaissance authors returning to black folk origins: Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter (1930), Arna Bontemps' God Sends Sunday (1931), Claude McKay's Banana Bottom (1933) and Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). These works might be seen as abandoning the Harlem Renaissance project, but that would be based on the mistaken notion that the Renaissance had ever been about a few square miles in northern Manhattan. The Renaissance was never really about Harlem, the physical space; it was about “Harlem,” the idea of a black utopia.

From about 1917 to 1929, that idea largely coincided with the physical space of the actual Harlem, but after the Crash, the once-thriving neighborhood degenerated rapidly into a slum (Gates 47). The Renaissance idea was then in need of new spaces. Hughes, Bontemps, McKay, and Hurston found those spaces in the folk cultures of their pasts, but they never stopped examining, through their art, what had happened in the actual Harlem, New York: the birth and death of the idea of a black utopia. This is why their return-to-folk-origin novels between the Crash and the Riot are not, conversely, to be valorized simply for their ethnographic content. There is plenty of it: the reader can learn of roadhouse blues in Hughes, Mississippi River sporting life in Bontemps, Jamaican Obeah practices in McKay, and southern black church politics in Hurston, among many other features of black folk life. But the authors considered here are interested in more than folk customs. They return to folk origins in order to continue to work through, by way of narrative, their thoughts and feelings about “Harlem” (not Harlem), what it was, why it ended, and how to survive its collapse. Their results are as various as their temperaments, as we shall see.

Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter and Negative Capability

In the last two months of 1817, British romantic poet John Keats wrote letters to family and friends in which he worked out his theory of negative capability. In a November 22 letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, Keats writes of his conviction that arguments happen only because the minds of contestants have not had sufficient time to enter into each other's points-of-view (31). Similarly, in a December 22 letter, he proclaims that the intensity of art makes “all disagreeables evaporate” (Keats 33). The logical handling of propositions and deductions, which Keats calls “consecutive reasoning” (32), cannot allow that both A and not A be true. Philosophers need to separate valid from faulty arguments, but Keats sees all ideas in terms of their beauty and imagination, and “what the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not” (31). A and not A might both be “truth” in this sense. Whenever abstraction leads Keats astray, as it sometimes does, he assures Bailey that “[t]he Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel” (32). The poet, through imagination, enters into the existence of beings, moments, or even ideas, avoiding the opposition of “disagreeables” or the claims of contending parties.

In the Harlem Renaissance, though Countee Cullen worshipped Keats, it was Langston Hughes who was the true poet of negative capability. That is why Hughes could, for instance, be an atheist and yet make use of the language of the black church in some of his poems (and celebrate the language of “sinners” just as much in other poems). He was not concerned with the truth-value of Christian theology as a statement about the nature of existence, but with the “truth” of certain religious experiences as expressions of black lives, their longing for love, their refusal to be defined by past frustrations, and the poetry of their language.

Hughes' intention to poeticize all of black life regardless of any oppositions within it put him in a somewhat difficult position during the Harlem Renaissance, for the movement was fracturing into contending parties almost from its inception. The older generation of Harlem Renaissance luminaries, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, conceived of the Renaissance as a means of improving the lives of black Americans through achievement in the arts, which would depict black people “of the higher type,” Du Bois' Talented Tenth, refined, cultured, and articulate in Standard English. This high-culture product of the Harlem Renaissance was supposed to convince white America to embrace blacks as equals, with measurable results, such as a reduction and eventual elimination of lynchings. Already by the beginning of 1926, however, Hughes was leading the charge of the movement's young Turks, rejecting the dignified respectability of the NAACP crowd in the name of artistic freedom and celebrating the vitality of what he referred to as “the low-down folks, the so-called common element” (Hughes, “Negro Artist” 92)—their jazz, blues, dialect, the numbers games, Harlem nightlife, sexual exuberance. What was at stake was who would be included in the new black utopia.

With the Crash in 1929 and the economic pressures of the Great Depression, the oppositions within black life had the potential to pull apart the Renaissance. However, the next year, in his novel Not Without Laughter, Hughes explores the possibility of unifying contending forces through the love that dreamy, young, incipient poet Sandy has for his grandmother, mother, and aunt in spite of the acrimony between them. In effect, Not Without Laughter is a novel of negative capability. Aunt Hager, the grandmother who washes white people's clothes, values hardworking respectability. The black church is her rock, and she is proud that white folk trust her, but she drives away her daughter Harriett, who hates white people and feels that life is too short to forego any opportunity to have fun. Harriett loves blues, jazz, and dancing and eventually ends up living as a prostitute in the Bottoms, the red light district, before restarting her career as a blues singer. Sandy's mother Anjee, domestic servant in white women's homes, is hopelessly in love with Sandy's father Jimboy, who is great at picking blues on a guitar, but is mostly gone from home, supposedly looking for work in different parts of the country from where he rarely writes back or sends money. Anjee's distraction over Jimboy often makes her at best a neglectful mother to Sandy, who by default is really raised by his grandmother Hager.

Hager, Harriett, and Anjee: Sandy “loved all three of them” and so “he didn't carry tales on any one of them to the others” (Hughes, Laughter 115). Sandy always “wanted to make everything all right” (95). But it is Aunt Hager who spells out what is needed:

It is a measure of Hughes' art that this great speech, which theoretically could tie together the different parts of Sandy's world and ultimately of the Harlem Renaissance—black and white, church people and sinners, country and city, women and men, high culture and low culture—is spoken by a character who is at least slightly a female “Uncle Tom” and who has already driven away one daughter, has another who is ashamed of her for her country ways, and is constantly attacking a third daughter's husband. Yet the speech she makes on the necessary unifying power of love clearly has the imprimatur of the author, of Langston Hughes himself, even if, by giving the speech to Hager, he knows how difficult it is for the speech to find its proper place in the world. But Hughes is like the composer Charles Ives, who in Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut, the second of his Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No.1) (1912), has the orchestra recreate the effect, on a July 4 celebration, of two marching bands approaching each other from different directions, their music mingling. Hughes reports that on the evening of the carnival “mourning songs of the Christians could be heard rising from the Hickory Woods [where they are holding a revival] while the profound syncopation of the minstrel band blared from Galoway's Lots, strangely intermingling their notes of praise and joy” (Laughter 109). The listener who must be “irritabl[y] reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 33) would want to shut out one or the other, the minstrel band or the Christians, one or the other marching band, but Hughes, like Ives, hears a third music rising above the two, the cacophony of a new inclusive American music.

That is why Sandy affirms the singing at the end of the novel, in Chicago, coming from “a little Southern church in a side street,” by “some old black worshippers” (Hughes, Laughter 298). Anjee seems ready to mock them as remnants from black country life, out of place in the big city, but Sandy, who is not even particularly religious (like Hughes), thinks it is beautiful because they sing that “Saints an' sinners all are gathered home” [emphasis added]. And that is why, when Sandy is stuck in his Aunt Tempy's respectable Harlem Renaissance home (and assigned to read W. E. B. Du Bois), Hughes gleefully affirms the irony that “the Bottoms should be the only section of Stanton where Negroes and whites mingled freely on equal terms” (239), for it is in the whorehouses of the red light district that “people of all colors came together for the sake of joy” (217). It is there that Hughes, ultimately, finds his preferred image of a black utopia. Hughes seeks unification, not separation. The negative capability of his Not Without Laughter gives him a way of examining all the contending forces at work in the Harlem Renaissance after the start of the Depression, ignoring their competing claims, and seeing them all as expressions of the lives of black people and even of America as a whole.

Arna Bontemps' God Sends Sunday and Mock Epic

Although mock epic became a popular form in eighteenth-century British literature, the first mock epic was composed by the first and greatest epic writer, Homer. In the Odyssey, Odysseus' great adventures are only told by Odysseus (not narrated by Homer directly) to the Phaeacians: his victory over the Cyclops Polyphemus, entrapment by the witch Circe, and journey into the underworld are all narrated second-hand. For all the reader knows, these may be just the fanciful ravings of an old wanderer, dependent on the hospitality of strangers. In the conflict in which the reader first sees Odysseus fight (i.e., reads Homer describe it directly), he is dressed as a beggar and forced to fight a fellow beggar, the fat Irus, for panhandling turf back home in Ithaca. The great Odysseus is reduced to the petty territorial claims of raggedy mendicants. And even after Odysseus vanquishes the usurpers, Homer turns from the heroic to the farcical. The old men of the island, fathers of the suitors Odysseus has slain, gather for revenge in Book XXIV, and are met by Odysseus with a little army of old men of his own, “warriors at a pinch despite their white hair” (Homer 519). A full scale skirmish between seniors threatens until Athena, exasperated, calls a halt to the deadly hijinks (552–3), and the epic is allowed finally to end without quite descending into pure farce.

Just as Homer punctuates the epic struggle of The Iliad and The Odyssey with the mock epic burlesque of Odyssey Book VIII and ends it with the same in Odyssey Book XXIV, so Arna Bontemps depicts the Harlem Renaissance's aspirational struggle in mock-epic style in God Sends Sunday (1931). He does that, first of all, by his choice of protagonist, Little Augie. Though Augie rises to prominence in his life as a jockey, kills two men in fights, and sleeps with many women, and though Bontemps at times drops the epithet “Little,” the author also reminds us, whenever Augie loses himself in dreams of grandeur, that he is after all just a little man who looks “as absurd as an infant” with “dreams of heroism too big for his body” (Bontemps 179). Though Augie has ridden real horses, beautiful winners, he himself is more like the merry-go-round horses of Part Two, section V: “one horse lacked a tail and one a foreleg and… others were losing their manes” (149).

All of these humbling elements connected to Augie would be fine if there was not an uncomfortable association of Augie with the Harlem Renaissance, that first glorious time of self-proclamation for African Americans. But Augie is a New Negro. When his winnings give him spending money, he buys expensive clothes and goes for what he thinks of as an elegant look, just as the New Negroes of the Harlem Renaissance aspired to look the part of gentlemen. The fact that Augie's taste is grotesque and tawdry only serves Bontemps' mock-epic purposes and raises the question of whether any form of preening, be it Augie's silk shirts with “two inch candy-stripes of purple, pink, or orange” (Bontemps 25) or Du Bois' famous dandified, if more tasteful, look, is faintly ridiculous.

Augie, like the Renaissance writers, has his ideal, and her name is Florence Dessau. Florence, of course, was the capital city of the first Renaissance, the Italian Cinquecento. And Dessau, which after all is just a common family name among the French creoles of Louisiana, was also the capital of another artistic renaissance, the modernist flowering of the Bauhaus school, centered in Dessau, Germany, from 1925 to 1932, during which God Sends Sunday was published. So Florence Dessau is twice over a reminder of renaissances ancient and modern. She also happens to be a white man's whore, as Augie discovers. Again, Bontemps was fully aware of the contention of critics that the Harlem Renaissance, for all its celebration of black artistic talent, was largely owned by whites—white revelers in whites-only Harlem nightclubs; white sponsors, like Charlotte Osgood Mason; and white publishing houses. But white proprietariness did nothing to diminish the vitality of the Harlem Renaissance's “social dreaming” (Sargent 5) about black utopias, any more than it sullied Florence Dessau's allure for Augie: “Florence's beauty fascinated Augie more than ever. It seemed more unreal, more unattainable” (Bontemps 41).

Like the Harlem Renaissance, Augie has his own Great Migration north, though in his case, it is from New Orleans to Saint Louis. It is there that Augie “met his own conception of fine living” (Bontemps 53), his black utopia. It is there, he feels, that black men really know how to express the most joyful possibilities of life. As for the women, they “could not fail to [help him] forget Florence Dessau” (53). He even finds a substitute for Dessau in Della Green (of the green, of nature). And he takes on and vanquishes the Natural Man, Biglow (big and vital in the low culture world). St. Louis, then, is Augie's complete Harlem Renaissance, but having gotten everything he thought he wanted there, it ceases to please him because it all feels like a pale imitation of what the white man has. Della Green might “look… for all the world like Florence… But she [is] not Florence” (73).

The Harlem Renaissance, Bontemps appears to suggest, was destined to fail to the extent that it imitated a white ideal. For Augie, that imitation does not work, even when he attains the white man's woman, for he finally moves in with Florence upon his return to New Orleans, flush with money, only to find that the neighbors cast him and Florence out of the fine house in the white neighborhood. Thus Augie lives with his dream woman, but only in a shack on the outskirts of town and then just until his luck at the track ends, after which Florence unsentimentally leaves him. As Augie leaves the scene of his renaissance for good, Bontemps constructs one of those scale reversals that remind his readers that, however grand Augie appears in moments, mostly in his own eyes, he is a small man in an uncaring world: “In the distance, he suggested an insect crawling toward the ultimate needle-point where the rails converge. Curiously, as his figure diminished, the ironic silk hat seemed to wax larger and larger. In the end it swallowed both man and luggage” (Bontemps 112).

Bontemps, like Homer, ends his “epic” with the battles of old men (Augie and Lissus), sad repetitions of more glorious origins. And as post-Crash writers were going back to southern folk origins, Bontemps has Augie go back, not to the south, but to a place just like it: the Mudtown section of Watts, California. But Augie is a dozen years past his prime, and though he repeats his pursuit of the young black beauty and his battle with the natural man, it is all simply too pitiful. Augie's nephew Terry “could almost cry looking at Augie in his ridiculous mashed-up hat” (Bontemps 162). “The sizes of things become temporarily adjusted” only by Augie's drinking liquor at this point (179), but he is “a hopeless old wreck”… “absurd as an infant,” forced to move on yet again because he cannot leave well enough alone and remember who he is.

The question is, why does Bontemps take such a mocking attitude towards the Harlem Renaissance through Little Augie? Why did Homer turn the great epics of The Iliad and The Odyssey into mock-epics? It is about coming home. About finding peace after the glory days have passed. The mock epic performs a readjustment of scale. Odysseus cannot be a husband and father if in his head he is forever the great Odysseus, warrior on the plains of Troy. He must be cut down from heroic to human size and reminded of his age in order to take possession of Ithaca. The glory days of the Harlem Renaissance ended with the Crash of 1929. Prior to that catastrophe, it was the “New Negro's” day—he had his Civic Club dinners, his Opportunity Awards, his press, his white patrons fascinated by his every move. With the crash and the ensuing Depression, that would all go away; black people might have their heads ringing with memories of the clink of champagne glasses and the rustle of flattering press clippings, but they might have to live in the dust.

Bontemps' mock epic readjusts scales in the service of living on through the hard times ahead. The glory days of the Harlem Renaissance, of Augie's Saint Louis, were fine because of the glimpses of some ideal they offered, but they were also faintly ridiculous (from the mock-epic point of view), much ado about nothing. If that were not the case, maybe it would be too painful to carry on post-Crash. But we are not fallen giants; we are human beings whose dreams, like all dreams, are like “toy balloons at a fair when suddenly, [they are loosed and] the sky [is] full of bright lovely things, gradually ascending on the wind” (Bontemps 66). The road lies ahead, and “there [is] no need to turn back” (196). Better get on up the road.

Claude McKay's Banana Bottom and the Imp in Utopia

In D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915), Will and Anna Brangwen visit Lincoln Cathedral, in England's East Midlands. Will seeks in the cathedral a consummate image of transcendence. His wife Anna is also struck by the cathedral's majesty, but she and Will are always in a state of tension, and so she balks at his ecstasy over the great church and gleefully seizes on the famous Lincoln Imp and other assorted gargoyles in the building, “wicked, odd little faces carved in stone” (Lawrence 195), calling his attention to them:

Outwardly, Will denies his wife's interpretation of the figures, but his experience of the cathedral is ruined (it had “become to him… a shapely heap of dead matter” [196]). For Anna, the imps free her from the cathedral's impact and, therefore, from her husband's domineering hold on her.

Claude McKay “had a profound and lasting admiration” for Lawrence (Cooper 208). And in Banana Bottom, his post-Crash Harlem Renaissance novel that returns to his folk roots in the Jamaican highlands, he makes use of a device similar to the Lincoln gargoyles as a way of giving his response to the Renaissance's utopian aspirations. The Renaissance of Talented Tenth elevation is present in Banana Bottom as the Mission, the protestant Church and school run by the descendant of white colonizers, Malcolm Craig, and his wife Priscilla, as so much of the Harlem Renaissance was sponsored by white New Yorkers. The Craigs want to sponsor “the right sort” of black Jamaican to take over the mission and eventually redeem a primitive local population. But McKay has a wicked—some would say even juvenile—sense of humor, and the novel keeps returning to crude and often sexual jokes. McKay allows Tabitha “Bita” Plant, the young Jamaican woman returned from an elevating education in England and adopted by the Craigs, to escape from an unwanted marital engagement when her fiancée, a pedantic bore the Craigs have slotted for inheriting the Mission, inexplicably shames himself by getting caught having sex with a goat, apparently a childhood habit that he has been unable to shake even after becoming educated and respectable. In language humorously incommensurate with the act, McKay refers to it as “one of those strange, unaccountable phenomena that sometimes startle with impish ingenuity even the most perfect Utopia” (175).

The imps in utopia, as the imps in the cathedral do for Will, spoil for Priscilla Craig her confidence in the Mission. She had been staring at the West African figurines and masks in the collection of a recently transferred English missionary, who uses the art objects to illustrate his lectures on “The Primitive Customs and Superstitions of the Primitive African” (McKay 197). Mrs. Craig is appalled by the objects, yet transfixed by them, until her long gazing at them produces a reverie in which the masks seem to come to life and dance around her, “hideously grinning… circling and darting towards her… with that mad grinning” (199). The face of her own intellectually disabled son, called “Patou” or screech-owl by the locals, merges with the “bodiless barbaric faces” of the African objects, thus reminding her that the imp in utopia is of the same flesh and blood as herself and cannot be easily dismissed. And later that night, she has a similar vision of Bita (sneaking home from a rendezvous with a young man of whom Mrs. Craig disapproves), her adopted daughter and the embodiment of her aspirations to elevate the black “natives.” In Mrs. Craig's sleepy disorientation, combined with the moonlight, Bita appears to her as a “dark nymph” confused with her memories of the “African masks and Patou gyrating around her” (201). It is not long before Bita leaves the Mission in disgrace (at least as far as Priscilla Craig is concerned), and Mrs. Craig despairs entirely of her life's work, as Will Brangwen despairs of Lincoln Cathedral in Lawrence's novel.

But just as the imps have a contrasting and liberating impact on Will's wife Anna, so a vision of the imp in utopia later frees Bita of the pressure she has felt to reconcile her English education, the disappointed hopes the Craigs had for her, and her need to take pride in herself as a black woman and a Jamaican. Exiled from the Mission back to her childhood home in the nearby town, Bita is sexually harassed and racially insulted by the half-white, spoiled aristocrat Marse Arthur. Though rescued by the family friend, Jubban (her eventual husband), she remains disturbed by the incident and seeks equanimity in meditating on some of her favorite poetry from her school days. Unfortunately, Marse Arthur's racial insult comes back to her “like a wicked imp… darting down into her deepest thinking and spoiling it” (McKay 268), as the imps had spoiled Will's experience of the cathedral and vitiated Priscilla Craig's pride in the Mission. But Bita, like Anna, experiences a positive side to the imp: “The constant image of the ugly little thing so insignificant and yet so insistent brought sharply home to Bita the sense and humour of the ridiculous in all things and she exploded with laughter” (269). The cathedral, the mission, of the Harlem Renaissance had aspired to raise black people to the highest possible level. With the Crash in 1929, the black utopia of the Renaissance was brought down to some extent into the dust of the Depression. McKay, like Hughes and Bontemps, turns from the city streets of Harlem to the black folk life of his past—in McKay's case, that of highland Jamaica—and finds no cause for despair, but laughs with the imps, who always knew of the “many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church” (or mission, or renaissance).

McKay ends Banana Bottom with Bita meditating with relish on a passage from Pascal's Pensées: “la vraie morale se moque de la morale; la morale du jugement se moque de la morale de l'esprit” (314). In other words, authentic, instinctual morality makes a mockery of intellectually conceived, rules-based morality. McKay is ironic in having Bita explicate one of the masters of European thought, even as she “descends” from her English education and her expected position as mistress of the Mission into the folk life of the uneducated and superstitious highland peasants. Just as Bita's friend Squire Gensir had found a Mozart melody hidden in a local peasant song (McKay 123–124), so Bita (and McKay) find the highest of thoughts in ordinary folk life and reaffirm the truth of a seventeenth-century French philosopher in twentieth-century rural Jamaica that the mocking laughter of the imps allows one to outlive the end of utopia.

Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine and the Power of Vergessen

In 1874, a young, thirty-year-old German professor at the University of Basel (Switzerland), Friedrich Nietzsche, published the second of his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen [Thoughts Out of Season], “The Use and Abuse of History.” Nietzsche argues in the essay that there is such a thing as too much historical knowledge and warns the Germans of his era that they must learn the power of Vergessen, or forgetting, if they want to live as fully as possible (8). Too much historical memory weighs down human beings and impedes action. Of course, society cannot do entirely without knowledge of the past, but “history must solve the problem of history” (Nietzsche 69), and the hero “will always rise against the blind force of facts, the tyranny of the actual” (74). Nietzsche praises the ancient Greeks for knowing history, but ultimately overcoming its paralyzing effect, from which he discovers “a parable for each one of us: he must organize the chaos in himself by ‘thinking himself back’ to his true needs” (99), an observation that could readily apply to the Harlem Renaissance's return-to-folk-origin novels between the Crash and the Race Riot.

Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, published one year after McKay's Banana Bottom and one year before the Harlem Race Riot, is virtually an extended meditation on the “use and abuse” of forgetting for the Harlem Renaissance project, both before and after the Crash. Like Bontemps, she goes back after the Crash to her family history, in her case to the history of her father and mother, and to the pre-Migration folk roots of African American culture. But as for Bontemps before her, and also for Hughes and McKay, she continues to examine the “Harlem Renaissance” utopian project, even as she plumbs the depths of its folk pre-history. Her “Harlem” (all black community) is there in Eatonville. But the “Harlem Renaissance” is also there in Jonah in the relationship between John and Lucy, between the “natchel man” (Hurston 122) and light (by which Lucy is derived from Latin). John is body, instinct, a “walking orgasm” (50); Lucy is not only light, but also ambition as well as the elicitor of words not just action (32), the mate who would put any husband on the ladder of uplift (110).

That relationship, between the higher consciousness of the New Negro and the instinctive vitality of the natural man (or woman), had been central to the Harlem Renaissance since the beginning, as for instance in McKay's “Negro Dancers” (1919) in which the McKay-like narrator contemplates the deep significance of the blithe dancers in the dingy Harlem basement club, dancers unconscious of anything special in their brilliant movements. The Renaissance was producing black thinkers, articulate, refined, educated, but feeling in themselves the beginnings of deracination, of alienation from the energy and natural grace of the folk. The natural men and women of those folk know the power of Vergessen, of forgetting their humiliations and obstacles in an oppressive, racist society, to live in the moment with energy and joy. Or rather, they do not know this power (knowing is the province of the New Negroes); they live it.

Under the influence of Lucy pulling the words out of him, drawing him towards articulation, John reiterates again and again his real strength, the power of forgetting. His very first prayer is an appeal to this power: “O Lawd… if you find any sin lurkin' in and about mah heart pleast pluck it out and cast in intuh de sea uh forgitfulness whar it'll never rise” (Hurston 25). Though, like his people, John knows hardship and misery, “he only remembered his misery in short snatches, while glory lay all over him for hours at a time” (104). John knows that he messes up, violates, for instance, Lucy's faith in him, or his church's expectations for their minister, but, he says, “Ah ain't got no remembrance.… when de sun… go intuh his house at night, he takes all mah remembrance wid ‘im” (122). John plunges into the present again and again, never burdened by memory, even memory of his own faults.

Of course, there is memory within John, but it is an unconscious one, the race memory of Africa, of the drum. Thus he is a natural at prayer only because “he rolled his drum up to the altar, and called his Congo Gods by Christian names” (Hurston 89), and thus he resonates so powerfully with his people, who “had brought to America in their skins… the dance drums of Africa” (29). But this skin (body, not mind) memory of Africa, of the African rhythm, is not a conscious memory, and so it, too, is a kind of forgetting, awaiting its light, it luce, Lucy, to direct it in the New World. And though Lucy is often disappointed or even betrayed by John, she reminds him that “ignorance is de hawse dat wisdom rides” (128); i.e., John's ignorance, his power of forgetting, is the horse. It is the energy that wisdom, light (Lucy) rides to make her man a “sho ‘nuff big nigger” (112, 116). The vitality of the folk, the natural men and women, is the source of energy that the New Negro intellectuals must harness in order to create a Renaissance, a black utopia of recognition for the greatness of the African American people.

But the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance end with the Crash, and Lucy dies. And subsequent to the Crash, Hughes, Bontemps, McKay, and now Hurston do recall what the Renaissance was, even as they appear to be abandoning it by leaving the streets of Harlem and returning to the black belt in their writings. Likewise, John, the great forgetter, after Lucy's death for the first time in his life must live under the grip of memory: “[H]is daily self seemed to be wearing thin, and the past seeped thru and mastered him for increasingly longer periods. He whose present had always been so bubbling that it crowded out past and future now found himself with a memory” (Hurston 141–142). Like Nietzsche's over-historical German, John's past “presses him down, and bows his shoulders” (Nietzsche 7).

What of this project of Hughes, Bontemps, McKay, and now Hurston to return, to go back, to remember the forgetting in black folk culture before the Renaissance, yet all the while reflecting on the Renaissance's lessons? It is typical of Hurston—the anthropologist with a graduate-level education repeatedly mistaken by others for a mere prankster or even minstrel performer—that she is the one to reflect as a whole in Jonah's Gourd Vine on this particular project of a return to roots, to assess and evaluate it, just as she would finally sum up the entire Renaissance in its final novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. And the answer to the question of the value of the return to roots is, for Zora, that it depends on how it is done. When John accepts Sally's love in Plant City, it appears as a positive return in a world that only does revolve in cycles after all, the world of “[t]he Lord of the wheel that turns on itself” (Hurston 141).

John has an opportunity to use, but not abuse, the past in loving again, in loving Sally with the forgetfulness of misery that love is, but without forgetting the mistakes he made with Lucy. He prays that “Lucy see it too, Lawd, so she kin rest,” but he again asks his God “to cast certain memories in duh sea of fuhgitfulness” (Hurston 191). John returns in mind and spirit to Eatonville, but in a new place and with a new love. Yet, when he actually, physically returns to Eatonville, to the place of his past, he becomes again the same John as before, the John of stupid forgetting, seduced into betraying Sally as before he had been seduced into betraying Lucy. If the going back of the return-to-folk-origin novels between the Crash and the Race Riot is simply a retreat from the Renaissance, a forgetting of the Renaissance's light (Lucy) in mere ethnographic accumulation, then it is simply “de same ole soup-bone—jus' warmed over” (194). However, if the going back in these works is not a mere return, but a means of working through in the mind the problems of the Harlem Renaissance project, of black utopia, then the result might be “a song for [the] heart,” as Sally's memory of John is after he is hit by the train, like Harlem in its glory was hit by the trainwreck of the Crash. Jonah's Gourd Vine, like Not Without Laughter, God Sends Sunday, and Banana Bottom, is no mere retreat to ethnography, but a “thinking… back to… true needs” as Nietzsche says (99), by organizing the chaos left in the wake of the Crash. It is a going back to work through.

Works Cited