Panel: Reconstructing African-American History
Copanelists: William Andrews and Kendra L. Fullwood
It has taken several generations for biographers to unearth the accurate details of the lives of Harlem Renaissance writers Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, in part because they wished to withhold some information, and in part because no biographer undertook the painstaking primary research to verify or correct long-standing myths and misinformation. For example, the birthdate of Hurston, who all her life successfully gave her age as ten to twelve years younger than she was, finally was substantiated long after Alice Walker went down to south Florida to unearth Hurston’s weed-covered gravestone in 1972 and then appeared on the cover of MS Magazine in 1975 with the official rehabilitation of Hurston’s literary legacy. The definitive biography of Hurston by Robert Hemenway (1980) is still ten years off the actual birthdate of 1891. Of course, Hurston’s own flamboyant autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1941), led readers astray for decades; and scholars failed to follow up.
A similar story is that of Nella Larsen, long called “the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance.” Thadious M. Davis, an African American scholar, published the major biography, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled in 1996. The irony of this title was exploited by the 2006 definitive work, George Hutchinson’s In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Both of these Larsen biography titles play upon W.E.B. DuBois’s famous discussion of the “double consciousness,” the “two-ness,” of “the Negro . . . a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” in the 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. While Davis imagines scenarios in Larsen’s life, Hutchinson actually does the research, presenting, among other revelations, that Larsen actually did live in Copenhagen for several years, and visited both as a child and as an adult, previously considered “lost” years about which nothing was known.
The questions should be asked: why did it take so long for the lives of these famous writers to be accurately researched? Are they marginalized as minorities and as women both? This is too simple. Do biographers too readily accept established history? Is there “a veil” of racial prejudice behind which African American writers can easily hide, and and so present a chosen persona to the wider public? Did the lives of Larsen and Hurston remain veiled because their fiction had been essentially forgotten for so many years until black feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s rediscovered these writers? Once their literary reputations were recovered, their lives began to be restored decades later.
Ann Rayson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her interests are in African American literature, ethnic American literatures, autobiography, and professional editing and publishing. She has published scholarly articles in journals such as African American Review, MELUS, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and Ethnic Studies Review, and has published several books on Hawaiian history that are used in many of Hawai‘i’s schools.