Domestic violence in the Harlem Renaissance: remaking the record in Nella Larsen's Passing and Toni Morrison's Jazz

African American Review, Spring, 2004 by Stephen Knadler

The story of the Great Migration, or the movement of over one million Southern African Americans to Northern cities such as New York between 1916 and 1930, has been repeatedly studied in terms of the pushes and pulls that caused this massive relocation. (4) In Farewell--We're Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration, Carole Marks points out, in contrast, that most histories of the black American experience have had a "male theme" (45). In the "domestic violence" stories in the weekly black press, we get a small glimpse, however, of the hidden history surrounding the specific conditions, problems, dislocations, and dreams of black women during the Migration. While most migrant males were attracted, especially in the early period before 1910, to cities such as Pittsburgh and Detroit that offered industrial jobs closed to women, single young black women tended to seek out cities that offered employment possibilities besides domestic service. Thus, in cities with more varied employment for women, such as New York City, there arose an imbalance between the sexes such that there were 124 black women for every 100 black men, with 30 percent of these women lodging or living alone (Jones 183). (5) Such a shortage of men for a large population of single women would have prompted some of the possessiveness and rivalry reported by the community newspapers as a defining characteristic of the "hysterical" black woman.

In comparison to white "ethnic" women, moreover, as Jacqueline Jones observes in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, black women tended to continue to work after marriage, and contributed a greater portion to the family income than their immigrant sisters. Although only 10 percent of foreign-born married women worked outside the home in 1920, 60 percent of black women (even those over 45) still acted as a principal wage earner in support of their families. Although such statistics are not hard to account for, since black men were locked into low-paying industrial jobs with little hope for advancement, or limited to service jobs as waiters, porters, and elevator men, the great percentage of black women could never hope to realize the ideal "modern" womanhood depicted in the "Clubs, Sororities, Beauty, Health" section of the black press. Because of the high cost of rent and the housing shortage, moreover, Harlem's black families tended to be less nuclear than their ethnic counterparts. Many women took in boarders to ease the family's financial burden and thus added psychological and sexual tensions to their households.

Yet, as a result of this increased share of the family's financial support, Harlem women frequently exercised a greater control over the household. While Virginia Woolf argues that women need a room of their own to achieve selfhood, black women in Harlem were often the ones renting the room and running the boarding houses that provided for the family. Such female control and even ownership over property, as the stories on domestic violence testify, elicited its own concomitant panic in the Harlem community. On December 17 and 24, 1927, for example, the New York Age ran warnings highlighted in boldly colored borders addressed, as they repeatedly noted, "To Women Who Have Rooms to Rent to Save Them from Being Framed by Officers." In these stories, offset from the rest of the week's news, the Age reported how police officers were posing as potential room renters to identify houses owned by women and then later raiding them under the pretense that the women were prostitutes. In many of the domestic violence stories it is not only the woman's physical and emotional integrity which is being challenged, but her control--as the primary wage earner--of the "room." As the subtitle of the March 7, 1928, feature in the Amsterdam News succinctly summarizes: "Jealousy Caused Near Tragedy When Repulsed Downtown Lover Returns: Woman Had Put Him Out of Her Apartment" (my italics). As the story relates, the man struck out in violence against his partner when she told him "he was no good.... And to get out." While one of the most salient features of the tabloid domestic violence stories is their omission of a detailed, sociologically based contextual analysis of the causes or conditions that might have prompted these alleged crimes of passion, domestic violence, as Audrey Mullender points out (40), often arises out of power struggles in which the individuals are contesting real material resources, rights, and benefits. Behind the weeklies' tabloid-style accounts of domestic violence lies an only intimated story of discrimination in employment and the nascent rise of female-headed households that caused men to feel their masculinity assaulted.