The following exercise should be the first in this curriculum unit because it clarifies what is meant by voice and how the use of different voices determines not only how things are written but what is written as well. I am borrowing an idea from a page of Russell Baker’s book, “Poor Russell’s Almanac.” The nursery rhyme, “Little Miss Muffet” in which he describes the rhyme through the ersatz voices of a sociologist, a militarist, a book reviewer, and others and finally a child. (The piece itself is worth sharing with your students if you do no other part of this curriculum unit. See the bibliography for the complete reference). In this vein, descriptions of Harlem by essayists, Harlem Renaissance writers, historians, a sociologist, a poet and an historian of city design follow. You can put a piece of paper over the authors’ names and descriptions before you make copies for the students so that you can discuss these questions: l) Who wrote each of the descriptions? 2) Who is the intended audience? 3) What’s the author’s purpose?
Afro-American author, Claude McKay, in his 1928 story, “Harlem Shadows”:The noise of Harlem, the sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets, and all night long, ragtime and blues playing somewhere, . . . singing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh! the contagious fever of Harlem.
Afro-American historian, Joseph McLaren:Regarding Afro-American literature, the spirit of the 1920s favored artistic expression by Afro-Americans; the Harlem Renaissance was proof of the craving for such expression. A number of scholars have attributed this growing interest in Afro-American literature to the hedonistic spirit of the 1920s and a resurgence of “primitivistic” ideas. Although these conditions were certainly present—with the speakeasy, bootleg gin, and organized crime as a backdrop—the growth of urbanization and the fact that many Afro-Americans had access to higher education allowed room for artistic talent and the creation of forums for its expression. In short, Harlem was the mecca of black entertainment in the 1920s and there is a connection between its cultural milieu and the emergence of literary artists such as Langston Hughes.
A white Southerner, Dan Lacy, documenting white racism:The black ghetto of the Northern cities provided for the first time an environment in which black leadership could rise and be sustained without depending on white acceptance. A Chicago Defender or New York Amsterdam News could assert black rights vigorously and attack white authority without risking its existence. A black lawyer could be outspoken without destroying his little role before the courts. Sustained only by his own congregation, a black minister could afford to be militant. The accumulation in one place of so many Negroes with more than ordinary drive and curiosity and with more education than was possible in the South made possible a genuine literary flourishing in Harlem. Black writers and musicians became organs of black self-awareness.
The Afro-American Harlem Renaissance author, Rudolph Fisher:The truth about Fifth Avenue has only half been told, that it harbors an aristocracy of residence already yielding to an aristocracy of commerce. Has any New Yorker confessed to the rest—that when aristocratic Fifth Avenue crosses One Hundred Tenth street, leaving Central Park behind, it leaves its aristocracy behind as well? Here are bargain-stores, babble, and kids, dinginess, odors, thick speech. Fallen from splendor and doubtless ashamed, the Avenue burrows into the ground—plunges beneath a park which hides it from One Hundred Sixteenth to One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street. Here it emerges moving uncertainly northward a few more blacks; and now—irony of ironies—finds itself in Negro Harlem.
You can see the Avenue change expression—blankness, horror, conviction., You can almost see it wag its head in self-commiseration. Not just because this is Harlem—these are proud streets in Harlem: Seventh Avenue of a Sunday afternoon, Strivers’ Row, and The Hill. Fifth Avenue’s shame lies in having missed these so-called dickty (as defined by the author, “swell”) sections, in having poked its head out into the dark kingdom’s backwoods. A city jungle this, if ever there was one, peopled largely by untamed creatures that live and die for the moment only. Accordingly, here strides melodrama, naked and unashamed.
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Afro-American poet, Claude McKay, 1922
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Harlem Shadows
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I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
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In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall
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Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass
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To bend and barter at desire’s call.
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Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
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Go prowling through the night from street to street! . . .
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Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
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Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
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Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
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The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
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Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
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In Harlem wandering from street to street.
Afro-American author and essayist, James Baldwin:Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents’ lifetime or in mine. Now as then the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block. Rents are 10 to 58 percent higher than anywhere else in the city; food, expensive everywhere, is more expensive here and of inferior quality; and now that the war is over and money is dwindling, clothes are carefully shopped for and seldom bought. Negroes, traditionally the last to be hired and the first to be fired, are finding jobs harder to get, and, while prices are rising implacably, wages are going down. All over Harlem now there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it. . .
An architectural (city design) historian, William Whyte:Harlem might one day be an example (of an area that can be “rehabilitated” and “house most of the people who were on the site earlier”). It has already suffered disinvestment and displacement. It is, in fact underpopulated, having lost almost a third of its population since 1970. Much of the tenement housing is burnt out. But Harlem has great advantages. It is well served with mass transit; it has broad, tree-lined avenues and excellent access to parks. There are many cleared sites for new housing; there is a fine stock of brownstones, some blocks of which, such as Striver’s Row, have been kept in excellent shape.
Hopefully these Harlem descriptions help clarify voice as applied to a city theme, but if you prefer, use the Russell Baker piece on Little Miss Muffet.
