6 - “To tell the truth about us”: the fictions and non-fictions of Jessie Fauset and Walter White

Summary

Jessie Fauset once told an interviewer that she, Walter White, and Nella Larsen became novelists after reading T. S. Stribling's Birthright, a novel that depicted the return of a newly minted black Harvard graduate to his southern hometown. His efforts at racial uplift flounder; his end is predictably tragic. Versions of this story had been told before, notably in Charles Chesnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition and W. E. B. Du Bois' short story “Of the Coming of John” in The Souls of Black Folk, for example. But Stribling, a white author writing on the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance, found an unusually responsive audience. His black readers noted that response as well as the fallacies in Stribling's fiction, which suggested that the protagonist's tragedy is his black ancestry, while his ambitions derive from his “white blood.” Fauset and White knew better. Deigning to speak for her peers, Fauset reasoned: “here is an audience waiting to hear the truth about us. Let us, who are better qualified to represent that truth than any white writer, try to do so.” White responded similarly, when he observed that Stribling had written his story from the outside. When White's friend H. L. Mencken challenged him to write a better book, he began work on The Fire in the Flint. Like Birthright, it depicts a northern-trained black physician who brings his skills to uplift a rural southern community. Many of the novel's details are drawn from White's experiences as the assistant field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For Fauset and White, the commitment to a single verifiable truth both inspires and cripples their fiction. Their non-fiction, by contrast, remains powerful.