The Forgotten Work of Jessie Redmon Fauset

Though she helped to usher in a crucial period of artistic flourishing, and was herself a vital participant in that flourishing, she was not destined to get much credit for it.PHOTOGRAPH BY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / CORBIS / VCG VIA GETTY

Among the events that helped to crystallize what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance was a dinner, in March, 1924, at the Civic Club, on West 12th Street. The idea for the dinner was initially hatched by Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the editor of Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League and, under Johnson, one of the leading outlets for young black writers. Johnson planned to invite twenty guests—a mix of white editors and publishers as well as black intellectuals and literary critics—to honor Jessie Redmon Fauset and the publication of “There Is Confusion,” her début novel, about a black middle-class family’s struggle for social equality. But when Johnson ran the idea by the writer and philosopher Alain Locke, who he hoped would serve as master of ceremonies, Locke said that the dinner should celebrate black writers in general, rather than just one in particular. So the purpose of the event changed, and the list of invitees grew; among those who ultimately attended were Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. Du Bois. That evening, attendees listened to a series of salutations, an address by Locke, and presentations by several black men. At the end of the dinner, Locke—who had praised “There Is Confusion” as what “the Negro intelligentsia has been clamoring for”—introduced Fauset. But though she was a guest of honor, she evidently felt like an afterthought. Years later, in 1933, she would write a scathing letter to Locke (who had just reviewed her most recent novel, about which he had some misgivings), declaring that he, with “consummate cleverness,” had managed, on that evening in 1924, to “keep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was meant”—that is to say, her.

By the time Fauset wrote that letter, the evening may have seemed representative of a larger fact about her career: though she helped to usher in a crucial period of artistic flourishing, and was herself a vital participant in that flourishing, she was not destined to get much credit for it. When the dinner was held, Fauset had been the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., for the previous five years. She aided the careers of several of the most notable writers from the Harlem Renaissance, publishing Langston Hughes’s first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in 1921, for example, and Gwendolyn Bennett’s début poem, “Nocturne,” in 1923. She would go on to publish several novels of her own, as well as poetry, book reviews, and essays. Langston Hughes, in his 1940 autobiography, “The Big Sea,” called Fauset, Johnson, and Locke “the three people who midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being.” By then, she was living in New Jersey, teaching, and hadn’t published anything in several years. “The Harlem Renaissance as we know it would not have been possible without her participation,” Cheryl A. Wall, the author of “Women of the Harlem Renaissance,” told me recently. “I think we lose a bit of our literary history if we do not acknowledge the contributions of Jessie Fauset.” So why has her own work been forgotten?

A simple answer to that question is that she was a woman. In his 1981 book, “When Harlem Was in Vogue,” the scholar David Levering Lewis writes of Fauset, “There is no telling what she would have done had she been a man, given her first-rate mind and formidable efficiency at any task.” And from the beginning the women of the Harlem Renaissance were slighted in celebrations of the movement. In 1925, when Locke published “The New Negro,” his landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays, which aimed “to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years,” only eight of the thirty-six contributors were women. Zora Neale Hurston, whom Locke criticized for not providing enough social commentary in her work, was famously out of print when Alice Walker revived her reputation in the nineteen-seventies. Fauset has not had such a high-profile champion. “Even when I mention Jessie Fauset to black scholars, they don’t know who she is,” Danielle Tillman Slaughter, the author of a thesis on Fauset’s work, told me recently. I spoke to a handful of contemporary fiction writers, including Nicole Dennis-Benn and Brit Bennett. They, too, said that they had never read her work.

“Initially, Fauset’s work was dismissed as sentimental and Victorian, primarily because she dealt with ‘women’s issues,’ centering on the marriage plot,” Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, said. Fauset’s second novel, “Plum Bun,” is probably her best, and it received the most attention when it was published, with reviews in The New Republic, the New York Times, and Saturday Review. Like “There Is Confusion,” it is a story about middle-class respectability. It centers on a mixed-race young woman named Angela Murray, who grows up in a posh black neighborhood in Philadelphia where each house looks just the same. All the residents know their neighbors’ names, and everyone goes to church on Sundays. Young women train to be teachers and young men do the same or strive to become post-office workers. Angela, tired of this bourgeois world, wants to become a famous painter, and believes that the only way to do so is to abandon her family, move to New York City, and pass for white. In New York, she meets a poor artist who falls in love with her and a wealthy white man she hopes to marry. At one point, she sees her sister at the train station in New York and pretends not to recognize her, so that she can keep up the charade that she is white. Later, however, in order to support a fellow art student, a black woman, she reveals her true identity. In a conversation with her sister, Angela says, “When I begin to delve into it, the matter of blood seems nothing compared with individuality, character, living. The truth of the matter is, the whole business was just making me fagged to death . . . You can’t fight and create at the same time.”

The novel raises questions that still feel urgent today: Does a black artist have to reflect the larger ideals of his or her community? Is individuality reserved for white people? These were questions that Fauset had asked herself. Like Angela Murray, Fauset, who was born in 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey, grew up in a middle-class family. Her mother died when she was young, and her father, an African Methodist minister, remarried and moved the family to Philadelphia. Though he practiced a respectable profession, the size of his family—his wife, a widow, had three children when they married, and then they had three more—meant that he had little money. Jessie attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls, and was groomed to become a teacher. She attended Cornell, where she studied Latin, Greek, German, and French, among other subjects, and became one of the first black women elected to Phi Beta Kappa; she later received an M.A. in French at the University of Pennsylvania. But she couldn’t get a job at any of the integrated schools in Philadelphia, and so she took a position at the segregated Douglass High School, in Baltimore, and then at M Street High School, in Washington, D.C. It was in Washington that she met Du Bois. She began contributing to The Crisis in 1912, just before her thirtieth birthday.

When Du Bois hired her as the magazine’s literary editor, in 1919, she moved, along with her sister, to Harlem, where she began hosting salons, and became a lively presence in the neighborhood’s artistic scene. (“And at the Seventh Avenue apartment of Jessie Fauset, literary soirées with much poetry and but little to drink were the order of the day,” Hughes writes in “The Big Sea.”) But she left the magazine, seven years later, on bad terms. Her departure stemmed from “increasing disenchantment on Jessie’s part with the way that it was going,” David Levering Lewis, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his two-volume biography of Du Bois, told me. For years, The Crisis gave out literary awards; then, Lewis explained, “at a date that is now vague, Du Bois came to think that the awards were being misused.” Du Bois decided that he wanted to focus on prizes related to business and finance, and Fauset apparently concluded that her position as literary editor was becoming insignificant. There may have been personal factors as well. In his research, Lewis discovered letters between Fauset and Du Bois that suggest the two were lovers. (On one occasion, when they were apart, and Du Bois wrote Fauset a letter, she read it first among all her mail, reread it, and then tucked it under her pillow. After ruminating on the letter, Fauset responded, on June 24, 1914, “When you want to be you can be so unspeakably kind and nice. And evidently you wanted to be this time.”)

Lewis, like the other scholars I spoke to, believes that Fauset “shouldn’t be forgotten. She’s so important.” Without her, he added, “we wouldn’t have found our way with Toomer and Hughes.” Lewis emphasized Fauset’s indispensability to Du Bois; he also regards her novels as notable, albeit more for their subject matter than their literary merit. “What is interesting about her fiction is the sociology,” he said. The novels represent “a tier of African-American fiction that whites and many African-Americans didn’t know or weren’t going to get to, which is upper-class, very genteel, college-educated—maybe from the second generation. They were a bit prissy, to some extent, even for the time, but they are useful.”

When Fauset left The Crisis, she hoped to secure a job as a proofreader for a publishing house. But, despite appealing to Joel Spingarn, the co-founder of Harcourt, Brace and the treasurer, at that time, of the N.A.A.C.P., she was unsuccessful. She got married in 1929, and wrote two more novels: “The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life” (1931), about a woman who tries to overcome her unimpressive lineage by marrying someone of a higher status, and “Comedy: American Style” (1933), which tackles the pervasiveness of colorism within the black community. Neither book received as much recognition as her earlier two. In 1939, she and her husband moved to New Jersey. She returned to teaching, until the death of her husband prompted her to move back to Philadelphia. She died there, of heart disease, in April, 1961.

“I believe that the time has come to do a fresh and thorough study of Jessie Redmon Fauset’s work,” Claire Oberon Garcia, a professor of English and the director of Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies at Colorado College, told me. “There is little to no scholarship on Fauset’s early short stories, travel writing, book reviews, translations, sketches, and reporting. A look at Fauset’s entire body of work reveals a writer who is more engaged with modern questions of race, class, and gender than she has been given credit for.” In a 1922 essay, “Some Notes on Color,” Fauset describes the social and political restrictions she faced as a black woman in America. She emphasizes the subtler, more inward burdens—“the tendency of the white world to judge us always at our worst and our own realization of that fact,” for instance, which results in “a stilted art and a lack of frank expression on our part,” as she puts it. “And so the puzzling, tangling, nerve-racking consciousness of color envelops and swathes us,” she concludes. “Some of us, it smothers.”