Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel. - Review - book review

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Farah Jasmine Griffin

Lawrence R. Rodgers. Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. 250 pp. $29.95 cloth/$14.95 paper.

Lawrence R. Rodgers's Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel is an important work of literary criticism and history whose major contribution is its re-introduction of little-known novels such as George Washington Lee's River George, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge, Curtis Lucas's The Flour is Dusty, Carl Offord's The White Face, Waters Turpin's O Canaan!, George Wylie Henderson's Jule, Aldon Bland's Behold a Cry, Otis Shackelford's Lillian Simmons; or, the Conflict of the Sections, and William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer. Rodgers's astute analysis of these novels calls for their re-publication and suggests the contours of a course on migration novels.

Professor Rodgers identifies four moments in the tradition of Great Migration Novel, each of which corresponds to a development in the form: the Early Migration Novel, The Harlem Renaissance, The Fugitive Migrant Novel of the 1930s and 1940s, and The Communal Migrant Novel of the period following the Depression. He closes with a discussion of contemporary migration novels that follow the publication of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar's Sport of the Gods initiates the form. Rodgers does a fine job of placing the novel in its historical context and in so doing raises important questions about the challenges and choices confronting Dunbar: "The challenge is not simply to evaluate Dunbar's career as a writer, but to address the more complex question of how to measure him in light of the era's racial nadir, the turn of the century environment of progress and resistance that paradoxically saw him becoming the country's first black literary celebrity for writing plantation poetry." For Rodgers, Dunbar's use of migration in Sport of the God's begins to address these issues. Rodgers juxtaposes his analysis of this much misunderstood novel with a reading of James Weldon Johnson's better known Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

Although large numbers of migrants found their way to Harlem during the period that we call the Harlem Renaissance, Rodgers notes that few of the novels of the period focus on the experience of migration. "Despite the imprint of the migration indelibly etched on the community of Harlem and the lives of the many writers of its literary culture, the fiction of the 1920's contains surprisingly little emphasis on coming to terms with the impact of the Great Migration." Many of the star writers of the Renaissance were migrants themselves, but Rodgers argues that most hailed from the black middle class. "This is a point that separates the migration experience of most renaissance writers from working-class migrants who constituted the renaissance's veiled chorus and provided the human critical mass necessary to allow it to flourish." Three of the most important novels of the period were migration novels: Jean Toomer's Cane, Walter White's Flight, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand. Nonetheless, Rodgers argues that "the m ajority of Harlem writers, having disregarded their migrant neighbors and embraced the commercially appealing topics of passing, primitivism, intra-racial color prejudice, and urban cabaret life too vigorously, ensured for themselves a legacy of fleeting period pieces."

If the Harlem Renaissance writers failed to make the most of the migration novel form, the generation that followed--"fueled by the depression economy, personal deprivation, and a strong sense of displacement--put migration at the center, not the periphery, of its artistic imagination." For these writers, Chicago, not Harlem was the setting for their most vibrant migration fiction. The chapter devoted to these novels, "The Fugitive Migrant Novel's Critique of Ascent," is the most compelling in Rodgers's work. Through an exploration of George Washington Lee's River George, Richard Wright's Native Son, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge, Curtis Lucas's The Flour is Dusty, and Carl Offord's The White Face, Rodgers offers sophisticated, historically grounded readings of novels that deserve renewed critical attention. Rodgers's organization of his readings around the city of Chicago forces us to consider Wright in the context of a group of talented African American writers who charted the territory of that city 's black population. Consequently Wright doesn't emerge as an exception but as part of a movement of writers who created a "fugitive migrant fiction" which registers "its frustration with America's racial landscape." Rodgers's reading of the literary landscape of black Chicago could have benefitted from the author's engagement of Carla Capetti's important Writing Chicago, which does not even appear in the bibliography. Herein lies the major weakness of Canaan Bound--Rodgers's failure to engage critical works of his contemporaries which have explored some of the same issues with which he is concerned.