Barbara Summers

American Visions, June-July, 1996 by Barbara Summers

For a full-time author, reading offers an inseparable combination of business and pleasure. I consider myself privileged to be able to read both for immediate fun and for eventual (please, Lord) profit.

Although I am primarily a fiction writer, 1996 seems to be guiding my hand toward fictional stories based on real people and events. One work in progress that now engages my attention is set during the Harlem Renaissance, exactly 70 years ago, in the summer of 1926, when a group of bold young writers and artists joined creative forces to publish the first - and only - issue of an exciting arts quarterly named Fire!!

Some of the lead characters of my story and of this era are Langston Hughes, Zora Neale. Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce Nugent. Working on a piece about these folks - whose work I had known or known of for decades forced me to reimagine them in other dimensions. They no longer slumbered comfortably as my revered artistic ancestors. Instead, they spoke and acted like the gifted, sometimes unruly 25-year-old kids of my son's generation, struggling with work and money and dreams while laughing at the future. I freely admit to falling in love with them anew. I find their beauty, audacity, talent and tenacity irresistible.

Researching the lives and reading the works of these creative groundbreakers - along with their older contemporaries, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, George Schuyler and Charles Johnson - has been made much easier by the recent publication of indispensable anthologies, reprints and biographical studies. For my story, three of the most valuable are The New Negro (Simon & Schuster, 1992), edited by Alain Locke, originally published in 1925; The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (Penguin, 1995), edited by David Levering Lewis; and Aaron Douglas: Art, Race and the Harlem Renaissance (University Press of Mississippi, 1995), by Amy Helene Kirschke.

Placing individuals in the context of this singularly star-dusted era is most vividly achieved in three wonderful works: This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), by Jervis Anderson; When Harlem Was in Vogue (Oxford, 1989), by David Levering Lewis; and, most recently, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), by Ann Douglas.

Reading the writings of the New Negroes of the '20s - and the many studies they inspired - is as humbling as it is thrilling. Their works are impeccably modern and diverse, emotionally resonant and intellectually challenging. No need for fin de siecle condescension here. The story of Fire!! is just as hot in the summer of '96 as it was in '26.

Barbara Summers is the author of Nouvelle Soul (Amistad, 1992), The Price You Pay (Amistad, 1993) and the forthcoming Skin Deep: The Story of Black Fashion Models (Amistad, 1997).