"Who Set You Flowin'?: The African-American Migration Narrative

African American Review, Spring, 1998 by Charles Scruggs

Charles Scruggs University of Arizona

The quotation in the title of Griffin's book comes from "Seventh Street" in Jean Toomer's Cane and refers to the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern cities in the twentieth century, an epical phenomenon that would not only leave a lasting impact on the literature of African Americans, but also on their music and visual arts, especially photography and painting. Indeed, Griffin's interdisciplinary approach in tackling this enormously complex subject is her greatest strength, for it allows her to treat the literary narrative of the Great Migration (her main interest) from various non-literary perspectives.

In attempting to answer the question posed by Toomer, she has organized her material into four sections that deal with distinct kinds of flowing movement of African Americans to, within, and from the modern city. In her first section, Griffin focuses on the multiple motivations for leaving the South, showing how artists often present a more cogent explanation for the migration mentality than do sociologists. For example, she brilliantly analyzes a painting from Jacob Lawrence's Migration of the Negro Series (1940-41) in which a huddled figure stares at an empty noose hanging from a bare branch in a stark landscape. The absent corpse and absent tree are terrifying because the one speaks of an intolerable human condition, the other of a curse placed on the Southern landscape. Starting from this perspective, Griffin gives us perceptive analyses of the complex lynching motifs that appear in various works of art, especially in Toomer's "Portrait in Georgia," Richard Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home," and Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit." The anti-pastoral theme that links these works together also points to the fact that the motivation for leaving the South was different for women than for men. Although black women, too, were lynched, they also had to endure another kind of violence, the sexual threat of white men experienced by Florence in Go Tell It on the Mountain or the paternal abuse suffered by Mattie in The Women of Brewster Place.

Griffin's second section deals with the initial confrontation between migrant and cityscape, and, again, she begins brilliantly with a Jacob Lawrence painting from the Migration Series, this one cluttered with people mobbing a train station during World War I. The cities of refuge are listed above the gates - Chicago, New York, St. Louis - but the promise of the Promised Land is compromised by a visual sense of entrapment. Using Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City," Toomer's "Seventh Street," Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy, and Richard Wright's American Hunger, Griffin describes how the migrants both shaped the new urban terrain and were shaped by it. In this section, she also begins to investigate a theme that will become increasingly important as her book progresses: Can a map be found in the remnants of a Southern folk culture to help one survive in an inhospitable urban environment?

Griffin's third section is appropriately called "Safe Places and Other Places: Navigating the Urban Landscape." These "safe places" are not only protective but nurturing. They represent a haven in the hostile city, and although they are essentially "feminine," they appear in the work of both male and female authors. Gwendolyn Brooks, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and even Ralph Ellison recognize their presence, but Richard Wright denies their validity because the black women who create and sustain them arrest the development of black manhood. To rephrase Griffin's argument, Wright is so obsessed with the horror of the "kitchenette," which in his mind black women perversely perpetuate through a worship of domestic space, that he fails to recognize the value of the "kitchen tradition" which passes down communal wisdom from generation to generation.

In the book's fourth section Griffin presents a counterpart to her previous thesis that the presence of the ancestor and folk culture in the city creates the possibility of "safe places." In "To Where From Here? The Final Vision of the Migration Narrative," she notes that recent black artists, especially women, return to the South to explore that setting as the site of the ancestor and folk culture. Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Amiri Bakara's The System of Dante's Hell follow Toomer's lead in "Kabnis" - all deal with the theme of migration in reverse, whereby various characters search for or stumble upon an ancestor. In the case of Quicksand, however, Helga Crane can find no redemption in the rural South because Nella Larsen refuses to acknowledge the value of folk culture.

While one of the strengths of Griffin's book is its attempt to provide an explanatory frame for the literature of the Great Migration, that attempt sometimes leads her to squeeze specific works into an interpretative mold that doesn't quite fit them. At these junctures, her effort to make everything agree with her general thesis seems to undercut the very strong arguments she has assembled. Thus Griffin's use of the folk/ancestor theme in Ann Petry's The Street and Dorothy West's The Living is Easy is quite misleading. She implies, for instance, that if, In The Street, Lutie had put trust in the memory of her grandmother instead of fantasizing about becoming a female Benjamin Franklin, then she would have been given the spiritual sustenance to survive in the city. Yet the novel's point is that neither Franklin's petty pragmatism nor the ancestor's folk wisdom is enough to protect her from the different levels of urban power that she's up against - Jones, Junto, Boots, and the lawyer who preys on her ignorance of New York's legal system. In a similar fashion, Griffin says of The Living Is Easy that "the South not only survives in the city but is necessary for the sustenance and survival of the migrant," and she points to the "Southern chapters" which describe Cleo's memories of her childhood as illustration. Yet these are the very memories that cause Cleo to destroy her sisters' happiness, to distort her memory of her father, and to help ruin her husband's fortune. Ignoring the sustaining elements of her culture is not the source of Cleo's tragedy; it is rather her inability to conceive of a South outside a personal, female-centered memory of a happy childhood. Her tragedy, like that of another Cleopatra, is that her strength of will brings about not only her downfall but the downfall of those around her.