6 - “Dark - Skinned Selves Without Fear or Shame”: Thurman and Nugent

Summary

Although the 1920s have been celebrated as the “free love” period, the Renaissance authors were the children of parents born during the Victorian era. Langston Hughes, an outspoken advocate of free expression, was born in 1902 and raised in good part by his grandmother. Claude McKay, like authors Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, was born in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A significant project of black writers, artists, and activists was the normalization of black sexuality, if not its liberation. For the bulk of African Americans, the post-emancipation period meant a variety of freedoms, including personal ones. “Free love” literature appalled many blacks because African Americans still fought an array of negative stereotypes, chief among them the myths of the sexually rampant male and lascivious female. Yet sexual abandon and illegal stores of alcohol were precisely why many other people came to Harlem, whether white or black. Most of the black middle class eschewed any behavior deemed salacious, or even inappropriate. Working-class folk were less interested in the mainstream’s approbation, as they had less to lose than the bourgeoisie. The tension between these levels of black society were played out in fictional settings ranging from the bars of McKay’s novels to the stylish living rooms of Jessie Fauset. Gin joints and buffet flats (apartments where musical entertainment, illegal liquor and sexual partners could be obtained) were places where the less inhibited could enjoy themselves away from the disapproving gaze of their social betters. Sexuality within the black community remained contested for decades in black discourse.