This symposium provides a necessary intellectual corrective, dismantling the gendered biases that long relegated Fauset to the periphery of the Harlem Renaissance. It is a rigorous re-evaluation that finally accords a literary "midwife" her rightful status as a foundational architect of Black modernism.
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Symposium: The Life and Works of Jessie Redmon FausetAdded:
Everybody.
>> [music] [music] >> Hi, good evening everyone.
[applause] Welcome to the Shamberg Center for Research and Black Culture. My name is Danielle Breido and I'm a curatorial specialist here in the department of public programs and exhibitions. It's our pleasure to have you here tonight for this symposium on the life and work and legacy of Jesse Redmond Faucet whose birthday was today actually.
Yeah. [applause] Faucet was an editor, poet, essaist, novelist, and educator. She was born in Camden County, New Jersey in 1882. And as the editor of the crisis, the NAACP's literary magazine, Faucet supported the careers of writers including Gene Tumer, County Cullen, Langston Hughes, Nella Larson, Claude McCay, and many others.
She is the author of several novels, including There is Confusion, There is Confusion, which is her first novel, and available in the bookstore for us um on sale this evening. This program is presented in partnership with the literary society and is just one amid a suite of programs dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance this week organized by Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Harlemite Lana Turner. The Literary Society founded in January 1982 is a New York City book discussion group based in Harlem committed to enhancing the independent reading study and understanding of fiction and non-fiction by a wide range of writers and authors of the African diaspora. Tonight we learn about Faucet's legacy with panelists Dr. Victoria Chevalier, Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, Dr. Zoe L.
Henry, and the Honorable Justice Deborah A. James. I'd love to invite Lana Turner now to introduce the program and our panel.
[applause] >> Good evening all and thank you for being here. Uh tonight's program is one that I think bears a little bit of looking into. Many of us have heard about the Harlem Renaissance and I think we all know something about it and somehow all of you have gotten here tonight. So it does mean something to us. Uh on my part, I was interested in first celebrating its centennial, which was of course last year. But one of the things that I was curious about was where the Civic Club, many of you know that the Civic Club dinner was the launch for the Harlem Renaissance, though everybody was up here working and doing things, but the Civic Club dinner was famous March 19 March 21, 1924.
And that dinner uh was pulled together with Charles Johnson who was the editor of Opportunity magazine which was the organ for the National Urban League.
Um he along with a number of writers who would meet with some regularity in the offices of the National Urban League which at the time was on 23rd Street because he had his ear to the grindstone knowing writers and people coming through and also looking at ways in which the race should and could be elevated, but elevated, as it turns out, that he thought through the arts, though he was a sociologist.
Duboce was the editor of the crisis magazine.
uh they would also have a point of view that was similar though he thought Duboce thought that the elevation of the race would come through as a result of both art and propaganda. He didn't see them as being separate. But it was Charles Johnson who realized that an opportunity did exist because he was pulling together uh a dinner to celebrate the publication of Jesse Redmond Faucett's book there is confusion which was published in 1924.
before the dinner would actually take off, he had already imagined something larger. And that something larger would be to have younger writers, younger negro writers, um, be introduced on that evening to what would be the titans of the white publishing industry. So Jesse imagining that this was going to be a lovely little dinner party for her and the launch of her book ends up at an event that wasn't quite what she had in mind. So if the event had that much in it, she got that much to say. So she was slightly sidelined. But one of the things you should know about Jesse Redmond Faucet is that before 1924, it was WB Deo who tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she would become the literary editor for the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis. She did. She packed up from Washington, came to Harlem. The offices for the NAACP at that time was on 13th Street and Fifth Avenue. So she would uh leave Harlem where she lived on 7th Avenue and travel down to 13th Street. There is confusion is the the book that she writes. It's her first novel and as the first novel uh and spending time with other writers, she is uh between two places. She's got the crisis that she works at every day and then there's Charles Johnson whose magazine Opportunity is the one that is fostering the dinner. He imagines something larger. He invites more people. This is the moment at which we think about the Harlem Renaissance taking off because one year later, March of 1925, Survey Graphic, which was uh edited by Paul Kellogg was the publisher actually devoted the entire magazine to the Young Negro artist Harlem as the Mecca for the New Negro. It is that magazine that celebrates that particular issue celebrates what we know of as the kickoff for or the launch for the Harlem Renaissance. I'm going to leave it at that. Hopefully, it will spark some of your interest to know a little bit more above and beyond this.
But I think it's important now to hear from an assembled panel of scholars. I would like to introduce Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin.
[applause] [applause] Dr. Griffin is um at Colombia uh University and is a major leading scholar. She is someone who uh people go and try and get her to do interviews and to do talks. She is always in demand. Um I think you should also look up her books. We didn't put all the books into anything, but please look up her books.
Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin will lead this discussion this evening. Thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> [applause] >> Good evening and thank you for joining us for this wonderful occasion. I want to thank Lana Turner and the um literary society for making this possible. I'm going to bring on the other speakers for tonight and then I'll introduce them. So I'd like to ask the honorable Justice Deborah James to come forward.
[applause] Dr. Victoria A. Shiovalier [applause] and my Colombia colleague Dr. Zoe L.
Henry.
[applause] So I'll do brief um biographies. I could spend the evening talking about these distinguished women, but you want to hear from them. Uh, Justice Deborah James, Judge James is a Supreme Court Justice, New York County, elected to that office in 2013. She began her judicial career as a New York City Civil Court judge in 1995.
Um, she is a double graduate of Cornell University. A double graduate of Cornell University. Um, she she is the president emeritus of the Association of Justices of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, a member of the National Association of Women Judges. She's a former chair of its women in prison committee, New York chapter. Um, she's the recipient of NWJ's Maddie Bell Davis Award and she earned her BA in American government and politics at the Cornell University as well as her JD from Columbia University. And she's going to be talking about >> Cornell Mhm.
>> Cornell.
>> Cornell. Yes. Cornell at Cornell University. Cornell University. And she's going to be talking about Jesse Faucet um and her time at Cornell University, Jesse Faucet's education at Cornell University.
Um so we're very excited to hear that information.
Yes. Dr. um Shioalier, Victoria Shioalier is at the School of Liberal Arts in English and World Languages.
um at Megar Evers College. She is professor of English there as well. Um the city oh I'm sorry Megar Evers City University New York where she teaches a wide range of courses um in the department of English and world languages including African-American US Latinx Caribbean and Latin American literature. She is also on the faculty of the graduate center at CUNI CUNI. Her co-edited anthology, the palgrave handbook of magical realism in the 21st century was published in May 2020. She um this the book manuscript in progress um focuses on um the development of the literary figure in 21st century neoslave narratives and her most recent publication is on the shaping force of Langston Hughes's debut pro poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers. She's going to be talking about um the reception of Jesse Faucett's novel when it first came out um and what she found in the archive about the early reception of Jesse Faucett's writing.
And Zoe Henry um is currently assistant professor in the department of English and comparative literature at Columbia University where she researches African-American literature, global modernism, gender and sexuality, feminist theory, and dance and performances. Her first book, The Public Interior Modernism, Theatricality, and Interracial Aesthetics, explores how women across mixed race modernist archive use the resources of the city to remain quote private in public. And in that book, she has a chapter on Jesse Faucet. And she's going to be talking with us about Jesse Faucet and dance. So each of our speakers will present in the order that I've introduced them for about 10 minutes. still talk and then we're going to have a conversation amongst them um about Miss Faucet and then we'll open it up and invite you to join the conversation with us. So, thank you again for coming and I'll turn it over to um our first speaker.
>> Well, thank you. I am a proud double alumni of uh alum of Cornell University, both the law school and the arts and sciences school. Um Columbia is a great law school, but >> Columbia, [laughter] that was the Columbia on the brain. Yeah, >> that's all right. And in fact, um, the reason why I'm here because I'm neither a literary historian nor historian, but it's because of my, uh, connection to Cornell. In fact, I just came back from a major gay gayla on the, um, uh, 50th anniversary of something called the Cornell Black Alumni Association.
And um I think part of the existence of that organization um is because of the earlier African-Americans who attended Cornell and um had uh challenges in doing that. Um so I'm going to my assignment is to talk about uh and we know when judges get involved in history as our Supreme Court has done there can be mischief caused. But I promise that I this jurist has done her research and I'm going to use first person uh uh as much as I can uh references um including I and I should start out in terms of the Cornell experience. I'll be reading I hope I don't put everyone to sleep but I'll try to uh read it in an animated fashion. There's a book called Part and Apart and the subtitle is The Black Experience at Cornell 1865 to 1945 and it's by a historian named Carol Cayman and in the book uh there are several sections that describe Faucet's experience at Cornell University. Um, so and by the way, uh, as part of this celebration, it took place in Washington DC of, uh, black alums of Cornell. We visited the, uh, uh, National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
And I looked to see if the Harlem Renaissance or Negro Renaissance as the the uh, curating indicated or the New Negro Movement had any materials about Jesse Faucet. And alas, there was nothing nothing about Faucet. There is a portrait of her in the in the National Portrait Gallery, but uh that was donated by the Harmon Foundation, but nothing that needs to change in the National um Museum of African-American History. So, um I'll start with thoughts its own words and please timekeeper, I can get I can judges can't get long with it, so please stop me. But uh there is a biograph biographical note in a um journal called uh the carolling dusk that was published in 1927 where Jesse Faucet describes her education thusly.
Philadelphia is where I was born and educated uh was the was once the dear delight of my heart but everything in my life has contrived contrived to pull me away from it. First, I traveled to Cornell University and came back with a five beta capaki and a degree of bachelor of arts. That launched me. Since then, I've seen England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Algeria. The College of France and the Aliance Frances have given me some points on the difference between the French of Stratford at Bo and that of Paris. And there was a pleasant year too at the University of Pennsylvania when I renewed my acquaintance with Philadelphia and earned a master's degree. So much for education. As occupations, I've taught Latin and French in Denver High School in in Washington DC. Uh and then she served as literary editor of the crisis. Wonderful days those. Now I'm teaching French again in the city of New York which at present claims my love and allegiance.
Like the French, I am fond of dancing and adore car cards and theater.
Probably because I am a minister's daughter. So those are her own words.
But now I'm going to read and I hope I don't overdo this, but uh I'm going to read a bit of uh the description of her life at Cornell.
Uh uh and I I'll mention that she attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls, a public school that um separate separate education for black uh students that ended in Philadelphia in 1881, a year before Faucet was born. So she commented later that about that experience in this school. I happened to be the only colored girl in my classes at high school. I'll never forget the agony I endured on entrance day when the white girls with whom I had played and studied through the great through the graded schools refused to acknowledge my greeting. She achieved high academic marks however and her father the minister was invited to offer to offer the graduation invocation.
Faucet's academic achievement, and again, this is quoting from um Cayman's uh book, Faucet's academic achievement implied that she was eligible to receive the Brin Maher scholarship, something any white student with the same standing would have been offered.
As yet, no African-American had metriculated at Binmar. And the school's president, a Cornell alumna, no less, M. Carrie Thomas, class of 1876, intended to keep it that way because Binmar attracted a large number of students, not to mention financial support from the south.
Thomas's solution was to send Faucet to Cornell. We're happy she they she did that. I mean, unhappy at at the circumstance, but happy she did that. I say to further quote she solicited half the tuition from a friend and provided the rest herself.
Cornell she believed was a place where faucet would be comfortable. An interesting assumption on Thomas's part. Thomas wrote quote I feel of course pledged to help raise the money for Miss Faucet's tuition fees.
Faucet pursued her studies at Cornell with diligence. Though Thomas, the shade doesn't end, I say parathetically, who had taken equivalence exams and graduated in two years, mused in 1904, that it seems to be taking Faucet a long time to get her degree," unquote. And I was thinking, wait a minute, she was paying for it, so she'd prefer the two years to the to the four. Um, so I'll go on a little bit. Let's see. Um, well, I'll go on a little. Seeking experience as a teacher, Faucet spoke with Professor Walter Wis Wilcox, a nationally known e economist and statistician at Cornell, who wrote her wrote on her behalf to we de boys. In 1903, Foster herself wrote to Deo asking if he might suggest a way to teach school during the summer. And this is where her would have been her junior year.
She suggested that if she told him something of herself, it might make her task easier. And her letter provides a valuable look at what Cornell was like for her. Now, the letter is very interesting, but because of time, I won't read it. But when this book comes back in stock, it's out of stock. I'm I'm mortified. Uh get a copy and I think you'll uh even if you're not a Cornelian, you'll appreciate particularly the sections about Faucet.
So, I'll read a little bit more and then I'll stop. Um what the next page? Well, I wanted to read one of the um negative I I'll summarize. So, uh Faucet did stay at Sage College, which was the dormatory for women. And it's interesting later on uh black students who ended up uh uh particularly in Cornell were not allowed to live uh on campus and they lived downtown in the historical community.
But at this point it's just uh faucet and one other African-American student who the author was not able to identify who were undergraduates. So she stated sage and this describes how the um white students kind of uh coraled around her and helped her protected her and the author surmises that was because there were other students that were probably not happy uh uh about her presence at Cornell.
And here's a story that I thought was quite moving. The students, however, could not entirely protect their black friend. Charlotte Crawford, one of the students, recalled the day she visited Professor George Bristol Bristol in his office. I suppose he was um their faculty adviser uh hers and faucet finding him quote very pale and much moved unquote. He said to her, "I have just done a very terrible thing." and indicated that she should look out the window to the arts quad. There she saw Jesse Faucet standing under a tree sobbing.
Bristol explained, "I have strongly advised that poor child to drop classics and study something else." He continued, "But what could I do? What possible use can she have for the classics in the life ahead of her?
Thus, the dilemma of the faculty encouraged talent students to follow their hearts and gifts and then faced a world unready to acknowledge a classically trained African-American uh woman.
But going on, Faucet graduated Fi Beta Cap Kappa Kappa in classics from Cornell University in 1905. A year later she absolutely brilliant. Brilliant. A year later she wrote to do the boys that she had been at Fisk, your own alma mada, is it not for five happy, interesting new weeks, getting acquainted, getting experience and growing. She taught English, which she enjoyed. So, I'm going to go on because um how much time I have, but I did want to talk about her uh well, more in passing because I didn't do the research in University of Pennsylvania, but she did earn uh a degree in uh French uh a master's degree that is at University of Pennsylvania. Uh she taught um Latin and French in the Danbar High School in Washington DC which is where she met uh Dubo ultimately then became the literary agent. Um and I wanted to talk about her time teaching at Dwit Clinton High School right here in New York City. So give me a moment. Let me see if I can find it because Dwick Clinton actually has a website uh or or a story in the uh Journal of Higher Education Athletics. Who knew >> about the history of um of of the of the of the uh school? Um I get the weeds here, but I'll just say early I'll just I will read from it. early to mid 20th century, it was rare to have black teachers in school in instructing predominantly white students, especially one with a rigorous curriculum and reputation.
The fact that Dwit Clinton employed Jesse Redmond Faucet to teach French and English literature speaks volumes about the school's position on racial equality and brotherhood.
Um, and then there was one more thing I wanted to talk about and that is Baldwin. The the I promise you, you know, AI we have to very careful because AI I I I wrote Baldwin was Baldwin taught by by um Jesse Faucet because he was at deal with Clinton that period.
She was dealing with Clinton for 17 years and it said the supposition is of course and I said wow the supposition that's AI. I actually found Baldwin's own words. I dig dug deeply. In an interview by Clayton Riley in 1896, Baldwin said as follows.
I began to be aware of Harlem. I was born during the Harlem Renaissance, but I was in the cradle. So, I wasn't aware of Ethel Waters, Bill Robinson, and Paul Robersonson, and all these people who make life very vivid vivid in Harlem.
And I became aware of Harlem in 1934 to 1936. would have been 11:13. Well, again, I repeat, I was too young to realize what was going around on around me. But when I became aware of it, became aware of Kanti Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jesse R. Farcet, Laura Near, Laura Zoran Neil Hursten, Wallace Thurman, it seemed to me that what happened in Harlem uh was a kind of I repeat, I grew up in a southern community, displaced the north, abruptly displaced. It seemed to me that what happened to Harlem was that a great many passionate pe people carrying carrying uh degrees of talent anyway left the land left the south anyway and came to what was sought as a kind of mecca and they made it one. Now, here's the quote where I said, "Yes, he he knew who she was."
You speaking about Langston Hughes, this is interesting. And Langston Hughes and these these academics will know more about this, but Langston Hughes did attribute Jesse Fost as being the mother um uh the midwife of the Harland Renaissance. But here's Baldwin talking about Langston Hughes and he's talking about Lenus. just for that kind of stylization talking about Lenson and Hughes. Looking back, it must have been difficult for him because I feel he was a kid. But he and Kanti Cullen had very different exteriors. In any case, he and Jesse R. Faucet, and I'd not really known who Jesse Raucet really was. She was one of my teachers. So, voila. But I looked and I looked, he was on the Magpie um literary magazine he wrote for and he had these two Jewish um uh classmates that remained friends that were also in the arts. And I said, "But doesn't mean he necessarily knew Jesse Fost, but in his own word, she was her he was her teacher."
And then he goes on and they had they all had a kind of polish, elegance, you see, at least from a kid's point of view, which Langston didn't have. And I thought that was a very interesting observation. So I think I'm going to stop there. I think I >> But that is so >> Yeah, I know. Really interesting. And I I was just so pleased when I found that because I initially supposition AI saying there supposition that he and then he in his own words said yes.
Polish elegance. Oh, and there was one more one more thing I did want to read and I >> No, I think I I think I'm done.
>> We'll come back. I think I'm done. We'll come back. All right. Thank you.
>> Detective work. Thank you.
>> [applause] >> Hi everyone. Um, so I just wanted to thank my fellow panelists for being here and of course Lana for the invitation to speak about Jesse Faucet, my fellow Cornelian. I I received my I earned my PhD [laughter] um at Cornell University. Um, and I wanted to, so allow me, bear with me as I frame this a little bit for you. I wrote uh extensively on my messes in my dissertation and the problem of my messes to in terms of African-American literature. And of course, uh, at the time, everyone was writing about the Harlem Renaissance. My parents were, uh, I I they were, um, I had much older parents, but they were new negroes. They were born during that period in the 20s and 30s. So uh I was fascinated with that period um of time. When I got to Cornell, I was also really really excited that this African-American woman named Jesse R. Faucet who had was one of the three literary midwives of the Harlem Renaissance. um as critics have have stated uh actually attended Cornell and the the cha the sub the subchapter that I wrote about her work in terms of my mises is entitled who is afraid of Jesse Faucet which of course is troping upon uh who's afraid of a Virginia wolf uh because what I found as a young graduate student um there at Cornell were a couple of things while Jesse Faucet had graduated in 1905 five beta kappa. I don't want to keep holding this. I mean, hopefully it'll stay up. Um, from Cornell University, there was there were, I think, three very small documents in the archive at the Olan Library on Jesse Faucet or about Jesse Faucet. So, it was very very thin. I mean, to call it thin is a compliment. Um, and then I I read the work and I was sort of fascinated because the work, you know, she's got four continental novels. There is confusion 1924. Plumb bun um a novel without a moral. Some people cite it as publication 1928 some 1929. Um the China berry tree a novel of American life which is 1931. And then comedy American style which is 1933.
So four very big interesting novels uh novels of ideas continental novels. And uh then I went to the literary critical reception of Faucet which was really really devastating. [laughter] Um at first I found some of the feminist uh responses to the earlier critical reception going all the way back to Claude McCay and the Harlem Renaissance and the people who the men who come later. But the original um people I encountered were Debbie McDow's work in the changing same and Ducal um and of course my at that time uh one of my dissertation directors uh Horten's J Spillers but what I found when I read the fiction and I you know I was telling Lana I haven't really thought about Jesse Faucet for since honestly since I wrote the dissertation but I feel that this interest in her provides a ground swell and a necessary ground swell because she's one of those writers she's one of those actors in African-American, black American life that has not received the kind of audience I think I would argue she deserves. Uh she wasn't just a novelist and a short story writer. She was an essaist. She was editor of the crisis. She was editor of the Brownies book. She wielded a great deal of power really in that moment in that new negro moment when this movement of you know cop uh you know civil rights by copyright as David Levering Lewis called it years ago uh was being fashioned. So, um, just, so I just wanted to frame I just wanted to set that out there for you a little bit and you know, you know, in terms of who's afraid of Jesse Faucet, what are we to make of Jesse Faucet today in 2026? Like what do we, you know, how do we address this? And I think that um, it appears it's really time and I think that this panel is evidence of it and all of these events that Lana Turner has put together and and other work that's been produced in the last 20 years or so. Um, demonstrates that it's time to reconsider her and provide a a a genuine critical audience for her work. Uh I'm remind just as a as a student I thought the work was you know especially the last three novels um plum bun China tree and comedy American style were examples of really interesting African-American literary modernism you know but what did I know because then I went [laughter] to the critical assessment and I read all of this incredible uh stuff which I will tell you about in a minute. Um, but what I thought of when I read the work was very right off the bat, um, there's a quote from Ralph Ellison's The World in the Jug, which is in my dissertation, where that helped me rethink and reframe the critical reception by the men from the Harlem Renaissance through up till about the black aesthetic period that I had read, which was so devastating that helped me reframe uh, her work. And this quote is from Harlem is nowhere. Um um I'm sorry. This quote is from the world and the and the jug. Uh and and especially in terms of the temporality that she's interested in in her novels, especially I think uh this this quote focuses and resonates with Elaine Lock's introductory lines in the New Negro and emphasizes the the even later critical reception uh that she receives from the black feminists of you know her spellers. Debbie Debbie Mcdow really leads and Dil and let Debbie McDow lead the charge and then Hortens later a little bit later. So as I wrote over 20 years ago 100 years ago regarding the problem of Faucett's early 20th century critical reception one might rewrite Ralph Ellison's first two lines of his famous argument with Irving how the world and the jug published in 1963. As such, why is it that when, and this is me limming on Ellison, why is it when black male critics confront the American as negro and female, [laughter] they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confidence superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that black male critics seem to rate literature by black women so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project.
So um ultimately you know when I was reading as a student I thought can this black woman's work uh you know can she even craft her work without the critical establishment ritually sacrificing her texts and to some degree I think over the 20th century there's been a kind of ritual sacrifice of Jesse Faucet which we are here to amend right [laughter] we are here to this is the second maybe the third reconstruction right [laughter] um and and you know have her tell her own story and we can ventriloquise that on her 144th birthday. Um, so Faucet's manipulation and conflation of time also figures the psychological character of Negroes, quote, caught in the vast process of change. End quote. As Ralph Ellison states in his 1948 essay, Harlem is Nowhere. Uh, quote, "But much has been written about the social and economic aspects of Harlem. We are here interested in its psychological character, a character that arises from the impact between urban slum conditions and folk sensibilities. Historically, the American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that has swept them from slavery to the condition of industrial men in a space of time so telescoped a bare 85 years that it is literally possible for them to step from feudalism into the vortex of industrialism simply by moving across the Mason Dixon line. End quote. So just as an example in the China berry tree which is Faucet's third novel from 1931 uh the narrative conventions that organize it suggest a confusion with time that mirrors the an indeterminacy of origins. Quote the book has a sim simultaneous time sense of about 1930 and about 18 1895.
This was from uh Carol uh Sanders uh the only booklength study that existed at the time in the late 1990s on Faucet.
Carol Sanders um booklength study on Jesse Faucet. Uh this is no accident on the part of the project itself. Faucet and many other writers struggling with this modernism prefigure invisible man by representing in the novel the complicated relationship African-Americans bore to modernity. The text performs this complexity through the coalescence of scenes in which women smoke cigarettes in the presence of their parents which was verboten. men drive quote shiny tricky little dark blue sports model Fords end quote and black dialect dialect is often preferred to standard English quote unquote in um one character malerie in spite of his fondness for words in literature like slang believing that it had to be had had about it an exactness and appropriateness that nothing no other form of expression equaled end quote at the same time community skating parties horse and sleigh rides walks in the woods all hearken back to the late 19th century And in Plum Plumb, a novel without a moral, the relationship between older forms of visual art like painting and sculpture are juxtaposed against metaphorizations of photography as a mechanical reproduction throughout the entire novel. Um, so you can imagine my shock as a graduate student when I got to these statements by um, you know, some of our fellow uh, literary critics.
And I wrote in my dissertation at the time, I'm going to I promise I'm going to quote the statements for you in a minute. Although Jesse Faucet's fiction is almost universally critiqued on the grounds of form, politics, and narrative complexity, there is no doubt that her fiction treads dangerous territory, even by contemporary standards. When not neglected, which is often, remember, I'm writing in the late 90s [laughter] by the literary establishment during and after the Harlem Renaissance. Faucett's novels are either sumearily dismissed or grudgingly regarded in both their literary merit and properly black political aspirations. There is perhaps no other Renaissance writer so categorically cast out of the kingdom of heaven >> [laughter] >> um and the literary traditions that that are ours right by her contemporaries and later 20th century critics of literature as is Jesse Faucet and successful editorship of the crisis and enthusiastic reception of her first novel there is confusion which launches the civic club dinner or was meant was the foil for the launch at the civic club dinner uh do not protect her from subsequent scathing bathing critical reception. Leading the Harlem Renaissance School of Critical Excommunication would have to be Elaine Lockach, whose review of Faucet's last novel, Comedy American Style, published in 1933, judged it, quote, too mid Victorian for moving power today. End quote. Claude McCay's observation that he was, of course, another Harlem Renaissance writer, Claude McKay, um, and and I'm actually teaching his banjo this semester to my students. So Claude McCay's observation that quote she was way over on the other side of the fence end quote among quote that closed and decorous circle of negro society which consists of persons who live proudly like the better class of conventional whites certainly does not return the favor of Faucett's own careful judgment in her reviews of his work. Remember Faucet obtained this position of power and really did like you know she she launched many of the great Harlem Renaissance poets, writers and artists that we know today. So it was it was shocking to me as a student to read this these comments from especially from the people that she had sort of shephered through. Um Robert Bone is one of several male critics who define faucet as a quote member of the rear guard who lagged behind end quote ostensibly for clinging to quote established literary conventions. The rear guard were considered the imitative quote unquote black writers who supposedly drew their source material from the black middle class in an effort to quote and orient negro art toward white opin opinion end quote and to apprise educated whites of the existence of respectable negroes end quote. So for bone faucets's purported emphasis on the black middle class results in novels that are quote uniformly sophomoric, trivial and dull.
[laughter] I mean you don't get much more of an indictment than that, right?
David Little John has no time for her vapidly gentile lace curtain romances quote unquote none of which quote rises above the stuffy tiny-minded circulating library norm quote unquote Addison Gail goes so far as to accuse Faucet of sacrificing quote racial uniqueness and individ individuality for American standardization end quote and surrendering quote black cultural artifacts in an attempt to become American so let me just say that Jesse Faucet's work these long continental novels are fascinating because while they may be formally structured by a kind of what would be perceived as a conventional aesthetic, the content is amazing. I mean, you've got racially passing characters. You've got the ellipses with Mattie Murray and Brokenaw in Plum Bun, which hearkens back to, of course, incidents in the life of a slave girl. You've got the rape of the mother.
Then you have um the flirtation with incest in the China berry tree and and which is of course you know a critique of patriarchy. You've got um the relationship of the black artist to the art form and um mechanical reproduction in plumb bun and of course in of course in comedy American style uh a focus on racial self-hatred and and suicide. So these are not [laughter] you know these are not safe topics you know in in in any you know by any uh stretch of the imagination. So as Deborah McDall suggests however these positions by the men of the earlier 20th century composed quote three of the most popular and simultaneously distorted partisan and inaccurate critical works of on African-American literature end quote.
What the history of this criticism reveals is that the terms of the debate are themselves reinscribed by a manachian racial and gendered gendered absolutism that organizes essentialist masculinist politics shaped by of course every historical moment in which one of those men is writing. I just like to say that. And which flirts with a vulgar scientific racism that reads race quote unquote in terms of authentic purities and inauthentic imposttors. As McDow argues, the answer to who is afraid of Jesse Faucet is to be discovered in the quote impregnable impregnable case of critical misuses quote unquote of such quote surface surface oppositions. So I'm going to I'm going to I don't know do should I Yeah, I'm going to wrap that up [laughter] and we can talk more about uh everything else having to do with faucet as my colleague takes over. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Um, of course, thank you to Lana Turner for bringing us all together. Um, thank you so much to Farah Griffin for moderating this panel. And thank you to my fellow panelists, Deborah and Victoria. It's so great to be in conversation with you all today.
Um, Deborah, I loved hearing um about Faucets's education. Um, and you had a there was a great quote um where you cited Faucet saying, "Like the French, I am fond of dancing." And that feels like a perfect segue into what I'm going to be talking about today. Um, which is, uh, dance and the figure of the black dancer, specifically the black ballerina uh, in Harlem. Uh, so Joanna Marshall, who is one of the three sort of major characters of There is Confusion, um, is striving to become a dancer. Um, and that among many other things is what the novel um is sort of following. Um, so I think because I have quite a bit to say, I will go ahead and jump in. Um, I'm also going to be um, uh, rehashing some of the uh, really devastating initial critical responses. Um, I have a few more uh, to add. Um, a few more uh, crazy um, crazy ones. So, um, my my title is called, um, or my presentation today is in want of applause. Uh, Jesse Redmond Faucet and the dancer.
So, at the March 1924 Civic Club dinner, only one person seemed prepared to celebrate its intended honore. That person was Gwendelyn Bennett, uh the then 21-year-old uh black female poet who stood up and read aloud a new poem um called to a US word. Uh Ben Bennett actually dedicated the poem to Jesse Faucet specifically uh upon the event of her debut novel there is confusion. Um and the poem was subsequently published in the May 1924 issue of the crisis. Um, and although Bennett notes in that printed version that to us word, like a word, but us with an S, is meant to speak to quote all Negro youth, known and unknown, who have a song to sing, a story to tell, or a vision for the sons of Earth. I think her larger message is arguably only possible because of Faucet. Um, I think she's really peering into not just Faucet, the car, the the the author, um, but the spirit of the work that Faucet is doing in this novel.
there's confusion which I'll be speaking about today. Um so in the spirit of this gathering and in commemoration of the original I thought I'd begin by reading Bennett's poem aloud. It's short. Um as it was read aloud on that auspicious evening in 1924.
Let us be still as ginger jars are still upon a Chinese shelf. And let us be contained by entities of self. Not still with lethargy and sloth, but quiet with the pushing of our growth. Not self-contained with smug identity, but conscious of the strength in entity.
If any have a song to sing that's different from the rest, oh, let them sing before the urgency of youth's behest. For some of us have songs to sing of jungle heat and fires, and some of us are solemn grown with pitiful desires. And there are those who feel the pull of seas beneath the skies, and some there be who want to crune of negro lis.
We claim no part with racial dirt. We want to sing the songs of birth. And so we stand like ginger jars, like ginger jars bound round with dust and age. Like jars of ginger we are sealed by nature's heritage.
But let us break the seal of years with pungent thrusts of song. For there is joy in long dried tears for wedded passions of a throng. So that's for Jesse Faucet.
There is so much that I admire about this poem. its movement from stasis to embodied passion. Its emphasis especially on the diversity of black selfhood and innovation pointing to those who channel the folk as much as the more solemn brooders. Um and perhaps most of all the image of the ginger jar resting on a shelf, its seal ready to be shot through with all forms of creativity. Indeed, when I think of Faucett's authoral style, especially in a novel, like there is confusion, Victoria, I'll be curious to hear what you think about this sort of playing with this idea, but I actually think of the intricate porcelain of a ginger jar, refined and ornate, but often misinterpreted as stuffy and conservative precisely because of these aesthetic flourishes. So, it's obviously beautiful. Um, but rarely is it appreciated for what it's trying to do or what may be inside the jar itself.
For beneath the domed lid of the jar, bound round with dust and age, there are these pungent thrusts. It's an incredible phrase. Just so many mixing things happening there. There are pungent thrusts of song and there is confusion. Um, we find, I think, forms of critique as biting as they are astute. Um, and a tremendous distance, um, a distance unappreciated by the critics between author and character.
Um, often reminiscent of Homer's skepticism of great heroes like Achilles or Odysius, of course, an author with whom we know Faucet, the classicist, spent much of her time. And I will also say that I I did not go to Cornell. Um, [clears throat] but [laughter] not too bad. I I I also um but I also when I came to undergrad thought that I was going to be a classicist until I realized that that meant that I had to um read and translate ancient Greek. Um so of course that dream went out the window. Um but I have so much appreciation so much more appreciation for Faucet. Um and so I think it's always worth bearing in mind and remembering like I love I love sort of honoring Faucet the classicist Faucet the scholar of the great epics um as much as she is um editor writer innovator in her own moment that she has a tremendous sense of literary history um a mistress also of irony satire and ry humor I mean some of her books are really funny was also an experimental writer in ways that the organized izers of the gathering itself would have championed.
So I'm thinking about Dubo and Elaine Luck here and and Charles Johnson if only they had learned to look within the jar. So sort of beyond the veneer of the porcelain decoration. Um, in what follows, I'll present some thoughts on the critical reception of Faucet's novel, sort of picking up um on on some of what Victoria was telling us about and on the profound importance of the figure of the black dancer and dance as a sort of embodied knowledge um in the novel. Um, in fact, uh, heroine Joanna Marsh Marshall's oscillation between embodiment on the one hand and a kind of cold functional reserve can actually tell us much about the competing tonal positions of the Harlem Renaissance as it would unfold. Um, so I think that is the great irony of sort of missing her as the intended celebrant of the Civic Club dinner is in some ways that very novel is anticipating some of the aesthetic and political debates that would animate the Harlem Renaissance to come.
So hence my title. Um, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman of color in possession of talent must be in want of applause. Little cutesy, I know, but riffing on Austin. Um, in its own era, there is confusion was belittled aesthetically precisely because of its commercial success. Um, a result of Faucet's use of the seemingly conventional sentimental novel form. For um, Faucet's contemporaries, uh, hers were merely another example of, and I think this is probably the worst one, the vapid gentiel lace curtain romances with the stuffy, tiny-minded, circulating library norm. Uh Claude McCay considered this book specifically to be quote awfully written with no attention to plot and bringing out of details. Quite a confusion in itself. Um yeah, Claude McC. The New Republic moreover chastised its quote unpardonable naive, casting confusion's own exertion as a kind of stylistic failure. So this is from the New Republic. Quote mediocre a work of puny painstaking labor. There is confusion is not meant for people who know anything about the negro and his problems.
And for Michael Arwinston in the dictionary of American Negro biography, one must admit that Faucet did not possess a great fictional talent. One must also admit that her insistence on portraying largely the best Negroes does result in a one-sided picture.
While some compared theirs confusion more favorably to fictional analyses of white bourgeoa social environments by authors like Edith Wharton and Jane Austin celebrated novelists of manners.
They also believe Faucet was nonetheless unable to mask her novel's work and relatedly lacked the satirical bite of those consumate ironists. So that she's trying too hard in the novel and you can sort of see that in the way that it's written. So if satire elevates Pride and Prejudice from melodrama to class critique, there is confusion remains theoretically mired in the conspicuousness of its romance.
There was no sense, as I will suggest, that the novel's labors and uptake of that uh Victorian romantic form might be obvious to readers by design precisely in inverse proportion to the seeming effortlessness, effortlessness of the black dancers's performance. So Joanna Marshall is working to become a dancer and the novel is emphasizing her labor just as the labor of the text itself is emphasized at the level of the linguistic and the aesthetic. So even as feminist scholars of the 1980s rightly turned their attention to faucets um their two for neglected corpus by reiterating these comparisons, many did so in spite of what they considered to be her novel's aesthetic flaws. And for the feminists recuperating Faucets's novels, um there emerged a third problem, finally more political than aesthetic. Um, so Cheryl Wall and Barbara Christian argue that Faucet's characters, including Joanna, um, and her sister Sylvia, um, they they resist the sensational, over sexualized presentation of black women, but by existing as their middle class, sophisticated counterparts in a in a manner that feels for them ultimately inauthentic to many black women's experiences. Um, and ironically, this aspect of the novel, less appreciated at that later moment of recuperation, was precisely what made it so exciting for for some thinkers. Um, and actually Elaine Lock's own review in the crisis argued that quote, "Here, in refreshing contrast with the bulk of fiction about the negro, we have a novel of the educated and aspiring classes."
It was not until Andrew Seil's The Coupling Convention, which is a fantastic monograph that I encourage everybody um to to check out um in 1993 that Faucets's um theoretically conventional writing came to be seen as itself rather unconventional, a subversion of the traditional marriage plot in keeping its own characters ever so cooly at emotional arms length. And Faucet's penchant for irony, as unforgiving as it is ultimately hilarious, may be her most cruy neglected feature and finally makes her most like those novelists of manners that I cited before. Um, so as Ducil argues, there is confusion lays the groundwork for more ideologically layered analysis than it has thus far received. I still think though that there is a fascinating tendency among modernist and contemporary readers alike to consider the novel as itself a kind of person. Like even the language of the reviews are conflating Faucet the author with the text. Um in a way that I think is actually quite telling and may have something to say to um Victoria what you were um what you were telling us about my Misus um citing of course McDow. Um, so there is this fascinating tendency for readers to consider the novel as a kind of person, one who is legibly black and female, even as the text works so hard to resist this singular form of articulation.
Um, I mean, it's a it's a complex novel.
Um, it has this convoluted and quote confused narrative style with its tapestry of multi-racial types and chiefly its kinesthetically rendered dance protagonist. Um I'm arguing in the book chapter from which this talk is drawn that there is confusion actually dramatizes on a formal level the exercise of feminine performance as a way of arbitrating between these competing doctrines of race essentialism that would reduce black women to either embodied sexual objects or abstracted unavailable mystery when I think even the most sympathetic readers were inclined to read them in this way. Um, as the narrator interjects at the novel's climax, quote, "One of the mysteries of the ages will be solved with the answer to the question, why do men consider women incalculable?"
That's Fost's narrator. Again, you can sort of hear the echoes, the irony. Um, it finally does so, I argue, by centering on the figure of the aloof yet laboring dancer of color whose forceful repetition of bodily movements are mirrored in the novel's own semantic musculature. So I'll say a little bit about Joanna Marshall and the arc of the text um which also follows the lives of um other other figures her friends Maggie Ellersley um uh Phillip um her [clears throat] brother as well as Peter B her love interest um it has an extended section that does like a really interesting historioggraphy of the Philadelphia buys tracing their legacy back through slavery and then thinking about the relationship between different family members. Um it it's it's it's really quite um quite dense. And so the overview that I'm giving um is just of one sort of particular strand, but a strand that I think um is telling. So Joanna Marshall possesses the cool inelastic properties of mind over matter so necessary for combating race prejudice in the 1920s urban north. And in this her routine mechanistic strivings emerges as a female artist of embodied significance gesturing towards a future in which black women would become ever more present on the public space of the stage. So Faucet's presentation of the dancer of color. And I I actually do think we're meant to read her as a ballerina um because she does take classes um with a with a French instructor who um segregates the class. So he insists that um that Joanna and her friends are in a separate class from the white students and his name is Mio Beruli. Um I think there are sort of echoes of ballet instruction in um sort of quite obvious ways. Um and Faucet's presentation of the dancer of color um among crowds of white dancers also paves the way for um dancers like Janet Collins and Raven Wilkinson um who broke the color barrier in um ballet in 1951 and 1955 respectively. Um so of course uh decades after this novel was published. So in the novel, Joanna sees nothing as valuable as arch achieving artistic fame irrespective of the realities of racial segregation. As a child, she demands from her father's stories of great black people. And when he informs her of the lives of famous black women, models like Harriet Tubman, Phyllis Wheatley, and Sojuner Truth, Joanna seizes upon the fact that these were women who had been slaves but had won their way to fame and freedom through their own efforts. Although not yet sure of how she will become successful like them, Joanna lies in bed at night dreaming of accomplishment through sustained physical work. She has an incredible um work ethic and a sense that labor will result um in just rewards. Joanna embraces the possibility of a specifically feminine uplift through forceful repetition, a trajectory theoretically untarnished by the landscape of American racism. She was quote like her father not only so far as ambition was concerned but also in her willingness to work. The method which she applied to one study she remembered to apply to another. And if this failed then she was able to make combinations uh so combinations um also like combinations of steps um as a dancer.
So, the dance regimen established in the novel's opening pages is also accompanied by an interpersonal distance. Um, one that sets Joanna apart from the prototypical romantic heroine, but actually likens her to Austinian archetypes like Eleanor Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility. Joanna, we learn, feels the need to be quote cool at any cost, keeping everyone and everything at a distance. Those closest to her observe that she is quote only mostly human. a woman with quote no heart, who is all head, all ideas, and if you don't see and act her way, she's got no use for you. I think it's really interesting actually that some of this language um almost echoes and anticipates the way that some of the critics were reading Faucet initially. Um other men we learn are quote a little afraid of her queenliness, of her faint condescension.
She took herself so seriously. More than this, Joanna cannot imagine anyone quote wanting to let up in their endeavors in the context of a rapidly shifting black political landscape, especially in favor of something as trivial as love. Her own love interest, Peter, remarks that she quote seemed to think of nothing but her dance. And in fact, this is the narrator musing. It is precisely Joanna's neglect of Peter in favor of her craft that makes her dance quote at her best, giving of her finest.
So this work ethic, this labor, this sort of almost machine-like mode serves a really important function in the novel. It allows Joanna to resist at key moments, threats of embodied um sort of over articulation and sexualization as when she encounters dance instructors who would reject her on the basis of skin color like that French ballet master Buli does on the one hand or demand minstrel see from her on the other um which is ultimately what we see even once she uh emerges as a successful classically trained dancer on the stage.
uh she's subsequently only offered um parts that are sort of reductive to menstrual stereotypes.
Joanna's creed, we learn, and I really like this quote, was that one kept a stiff upper lip even to oneself.
This ethic ultimately lands her a lead role on an off Broadway production, The Dance of the Dance of Nations, predominantly composed of white dancers.
um and she's made to perform the role of America.
At the same time, the novel itself seems to be working alongside Joanna's routines in order to prepare its conclusion via the familiar 19th century marriage plot. Um but again, I think to read the novel as a straightforward presentation of Faucet's own positionality seems to neglect the diversity of figures, male and female, black and white, that move in and out of narrative focus throughout. I'm almost done.
Of course, Joanna Marshall ultimately decides to give up her career as a dancer in favor of marriage and child rearing. Um, it's sort of a weird ending to a book that has been so focused on her aspiring to become a dancer and when she actually does emerge as a successful dancer. Um the novel Sanguin Conclusion though largely unremarked in its time of writing has also understandably left many subsequent feminist critics perplexed. Um so for Deborah McDow there is confusion's ending still marks faucet as a quote traditionalist regarding women's roles um with a patent ambivalence to feminist issues alternately quote forthright and ky for Hazel KBY it is the ultimate quote conservatism of Faucett's ideology which dominates her texts a position that scholars like Sandra Gild Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar echo in some vital sense these scholars are clearly right uh for faucets dancer for Faucet's dancer protagonist once so committed to achieving success on her own terms to finally give up her career is a strangely conservative move one that seems to maybe deny the feminist work the preceding pages have exerted I find this reading to be compelling yet ultimately incomplete we can complicate the critical consensus um by returning to the logic of muscular health itself a kind of kinesthetic mode as this logic gets represented anesthetic ally refracted by the text.
So what if we read there is confusion in the way that a dancer would? In other words, where there is confusion initially insists on the repeat exercises of feminine performance as a mode of liberation, Faucet's final pages can also be read as bringing the notion of rest to the four, the very kind so cruy denied to black women above all.
And of course, although this is how this novel ends, Faucet will continue to take up this kind of work in subsequent novels like Plum Bun. This reminds readers that the physical and mental labor performed by her black heroine also requires sustained periods of non-activity reflected in Joanna's metaphorical submersion into what she quotes what she calls quote a sea bath of bliss at the end when she marries her love interest. This, after all, is what finally distinguishes the woman from the machine. Unable to produce endless new material, the dancer must actively choose to cease moving if she is to perform another day, to eat the plum bun she has been metaphorically offered.
These muscular gaps, these muscular lacun, Joanna's rest and repair are finally reflected in the novel's biggest formal elision. So this is my reading of what the novel does. Its refusal um by way of a too easy marriage to resolve the ideological tensions it has worked so hard to produce throughout. Put differently, Faucet's ending is both satisfying as love story and dissatisfying as feminist critique or better we are dissatisfied by our satisfaction. And it is precisely this ambivalence itself, a kind of release that makes the novel so radical in its commitment to a non-s singular black feminist future. Thank you.
[applause] So, we have um a few minutes to have a brief conversation and if you have questions, I'm going to ask you to sort of gather them and think about them and we'll open up for your um questions or comments um in about five minutes, 10 minutes. Um, one of the things that themes that ran throughout from the very beginning when you were talking about Deborah about there's nothing in the National Museum of African-American History, the Cornell book is out of print, um, these early misreadings of the novel and you all kind of inserting a sort of call for rereadings and you giving us these new critical readings. Um it feels like we are, you know, this series of events that the literary society has organized that Lana has creatively imagined seem to be calling for um Jesse Faucet now, Jesse Faucet in this moment.
And so my one of the questions that I have for all of you from your various standpoints is why Jesse Faucet now?
What what does um >> a consideration a reconsideration of Jesse Faucet what might it yield something what new might it yield for us now that would be different from before?
What might we learn based on what you've pursued so far? Um, fellow Cornell alum, [laughter] >> your question brings up for me a a moment in uh, American life and politics where um, assumptions we made about uh, women and our rights. Um, the the equal rights amendment has still not been in adopted but um the roll back of of the repeal of Ro v. Wade and >> and the kind of contests that are going on even discussions about whether women should have the right to vote they should vote in accordance with their um husband's positions. Um, and then for black people, uh, the question of our our franchise, our our history, I I think that's sort of what it brings up for me that that in this moment, um, perhaps we there is a call to to to to study uh, Jesse uh, Faucet's uh, writing um, particularly in light of the the scholarly work that the other pan panelists have done in terms of what she was saying about um gender and race >> in her in her novel. So >> yeah, I was thinking as you were talking just kind of the sort of roll back to admissions to elite schools, you know, um and hear a super qualified student like, you know, not even a pretense. Oh no, she can't come here, >> right? She can't come here and she can come here and she can excel, but there is no future for her. So I'm going to tell her to leave. um you know that that where we find ourselves in this moment that someone is qu highly qualified and yet her perseverance and her insistence on doing this anyway, right? Um that she went on and did it. But yes, why Jesse now? Like what what what might be different this time around?
>> I really like the question. Um, I think it's in the introduction to the China Berry Tree where Faucet writes and I really like the fact that you found the Baldwin writing because she writes in the intro in that introduction that to be a negro in America is to posit a dramatic situation and I think that quote is oftentimes I think Baldwin said something like that and it's often attributed only to him. But so in terms of this idea of why why Jesse Faucet now why do we do this now? I mean besides the obvious that I think you know people got it wrong [laughter] you know and and you know she was obviously you know contributing a great deal not to mention the fact that when you make a commitment to an intellectual life which she did >> it's got to mean something.
>> Yeah.
>> You know and if it doesn't mean anything to a lot of people it's got to mean something to people like us. So I I think that that's where the work comes in when and where we enter. And I also really liked Zoe what you were saying about the the the kind of lack of distance in the critical responses between Faucet and her work because I actually did this was straight out of my dissertation many years ago. Uh it is it is as if for the critics of Faucet's work there is no realism only a specific and policed reality.
>> In the case of this black female subject in the business of representing black life there is no manipulation of form only rude fact. It's kind of familiar, right? like are we not sort of living that? So I would think right now [laughter] I mean or at least in the last 20 years it's certainly right now.
So I would say in answer to your question, which is a great question, I'd say, you know, and to my panelists too, like um and as a way to Jesse Faucet now would be a a way to further resist um the confusions in language, the confusions in definition, the confusions in experiences that you know people who are particularly vulnerable whether they're women or people of color or women who are people of color and immigrants and you know LGBTQIA people are particularly vulnerable too. So that's why >> yeah [laughter] >> no that's that's great. Um, and I think to that I'll just add, you know, the the story of the Harlem Renaissance is often told as one of sort of youthful exuberance, right? That is sort of how the Civic Cloud dinner got commandeered is it sort of turned into a let's sort of celebrate and make good on this new exciting energy. Um, I think County Colin was like asked to get up and read something at one point. Uh he was still an undergrad then. Um Gwendel and Bennett was 21 years old. Um and thinking about Faucet as the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance in Hughes's terms is again a weirdly um sort of emphasizing her role in bringing something younger and potentially more innovative and more exciting or relevant into life. um at the expense of appreciating maybe what the midwife is actually doing on [laughter] her own terms. Um and something that hasn't come up yet in this conversation is that um Faucet was 41 when she published her first novel. Um, and I guess I've been thinking a lot lately about um, sort of what what counts as avantgard, who gets to sort of be in the club of um, sort of innovation. And it is interesting how often even in the way that we talk about the Harlem Renaissance, we tend to reproduce those terms that assume sort of young early in life equals exciting, middle, late in life equals uh retrograde or conservative or all of the interesting stuff has been done. But of course, Faucet at 41 was just beginning and would go on to write three more novels as well as short stories and poetry and would all of that while also working as an editor. [snorts] Um, and so I think there's there's a really um interesting book by um a colleague of mine, a former teacher actually, um his name is Scott Herring um and the book is called Aging Moderns. Um, and it's about sort of re-evaluating the story of modernism and the new modernist studies through the eyes of figures who remained and continued to write well after they aged out of the sort of limelight. Um, and I mean it's just it's a it's a beautiful book. Um, and you know, it considers things like, of course, Junah Barnes's Nightwood, but also um the grocery lists and the sort of poems that she would write to herself at age like 55 or 60 um as a sort of continuation of the project that she began um when people were giving her attention because she was in her 20s. And so I guess for me, why Faucet now? Um, if we think about maybe like the the first um the sort of first generation of reappreciating the Harlem Renaissance as one that emphasized like look how new it is, look how young everybody is. Maybe perhaps the time is right for us to be like not emphasizing youth as the primary factor behind innovation, but rather thinking about what becomes known in the sort of I don't know in the stillness, right? To go back to the Bennett line about the ginger jars. Um, you know, what might be what what might be new that has nothing to do with youth.
>> Yeah. Um so so I think that I think that it's a good time um for for re-evaluating some of those assumptions.
Um and there Faucet is not the only one who um I think deserves a re-evaluation.
Um I knew very little about Regina Anderson um who was also at the Civic Club dinner and was a librarian. There's a great um sort of new book about her that has just come out from I think University of um Pennsylvania Press um University of Illinois maybe. But anyway um I just I think it's a good time for um yeah reconsidering how we talk about what counts as exciting innovative art.
>> Yeah. Yeah. And even I think when you think about, you know, the older so-called architects, Elaine Lockach and Charles Johnson and and WB De Boyce, like she should be in that pantheon, too.
>> And in some ways, she's more um she's more flexible because she's the one who's saying, "No, these she's the one who's like publishing these younger artists as as they're kind of being more critical of them and trying to police some of them. she's opening up avenues for them. So there there's also a space for her both in that pantheon and as the creative artist as well.
>> And I'm trying to I don't know if there was anyone else who really was able or who really was sort of moving and modulating >> quite in the in the way that she was >> the same way. Right. Right. Right.
>> Um are there questions? We're going to open it up for questions from the audience. So if there are I can't really tell if if there are people lined up right now.
>> [laughter] >> Yeah, >> I can't tell. Um, while we're waiting, um, did you all have questions for each other or things to follow up >> on with each other?
>> I was wondering about Zoe. I was wondering about what you, um, argued about the end of there is confusion. And I was thinking, of course, about the ends of the other novels and um, and of course the the the the moniker, you know, the the accusation of conventionality. And I was wondering, you know, there's confusion ends with the marriage, right? So I was wondering how if if you might consider like desire >> right desire is such an important feature of Faucett's work and of course it gets torqued through you know the two discourses that shaped the Renaissance p primitivism and racial uplift right and the you know the contradiction of double aims or multiple [laughter] you know but I'm just wondering what you thought about that in terms of the the marriage plot and yeah like like the desire of these women characters in certainly in there is >> confusion Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean you're you're absolutely right and I think that um that's one of the things that makes Joanna in particular such an interesting character is it's so clear that that sort of maybe partially repressed desire at the beginning is what's underpinning um a lot of the sort of coldness that other people take such issue with in her. So I I start I really like the idea that maybe what is read as a giving in to the conventions of the marriage plot could also be appreciated as a sort of reclamation of um a sort of black woman's sexuality and sexual desire for the man that she's always loved but has never really allowed herself to love.
Um, I think that's a really interesting idea, especially when you put Joanna in conversation um with someone like Maggie Ellersley, who is the more sort of workingclass figure in that novel, but um sort of works her way up um and has a number of sort of devastating relationships, but is maybe ultimately more in touch with a certain kind of desire. um sort of not only desire for uh ambition and professional success, but a desire to live her life on her own terms. Um so that's really interesting.
I I I love that and it's something I'll have to think more about.
>> So we do have a question back here, then one over here.
>> Yes. Well, I'd like to point out for one thing that for one that for women most of the time throughout our history, even for black women, marriage has meant protection. That's why Joanna's mother is able to live as she does because Joel is taking care of her. And that is why Maggie is so desperate to marry and to marry up. So that's a that's normal. uh in most societies and in American society throughout much of our history, maybe not so much now, but in the past, but I I just want to point out I want to ask one question about her wanting to be about Joanna's wanting to be a dancer because Joanna at one point as she's driving home, this is getting into the weeds of the novel, yes, [laughter] but driving home with her father from the theater and she says she wanted greatness and she says well didn't you want something else for me >> and you wanted me and she said I went through all this to become what a dancer >> and she really wanted to be Harriet Tubman and Sjourer Truth and all of those people so that I wonder if that being a dancer is really an achievement of great greatness as you posit.
>> Well, what's interesting is that in that conversation with her father, she's actually asking him what he thinks about her having become a dancer and then the text says um and he was forced to admit that he had hoped for something different.
>> Exactly.
>> So, I think it's partially her I think it's partially a distance between what she wants for herself and what her father wants for her. And I I don't think it's a stretch to say that if her chosen art is dance, just like Faucet's chosen art was literature or classics or French or dancing like the French, um then there's nothing in the novel to me to suggest that that achieving a certain level of success as a dancer is not um is not analogous to or at least um uh sort of as meaningful as the kinds of achievements of black women that her father is telling her about um and so I guess I would say that I mean it's it's an interesting moment for interrogating not just her relationship to her own sense of success but her relationship to her father's sense of what he [snorts] wants for her. And I'm thinking about I was just teaching um uh Song of Solomon in Lithham um and uh Tony Morrison's beautiful forward in which she writes that when her father died part of what was so painful for her was that it was not only his death but the death of his sense of who she was.
>> Yeah.
>> And I think that is part of what's happening in that scene.
Um I think over on this side.
>> Yes. Um thank you so much. This was wonderful. Thank you all for your remarks. And um I have a question about kind of three things. So when we talk about respectability in terms of black women writers, it's a really good way to dismiss the writer, right? I mean, oh, she's just playing with respectability politics. But when we talk about the novel of manners, that's a storied tradition in the history of fiction. So you have the respectability, you have the novel of manners, and then you have the biographical fact of Faucett's long-standing affair with Dubo, >> that she had a very good reason to hide.
I mean, it's really smart if you don't want people to know that you're having an affair with a married man to walk around wearing your five beta cap, a key, and a strand of pearls. So, I just like to hear you talking about Faucet's negotiation of these three things. So, thank you.
>> That's really great.
>> Yeah. [laughter] >> You did not hear about the affair from the stage.
>> No, but we're not denying it.
>> No. No. No. But I I I like the idea of of in in the sentimental novel. Right.
Right. Um I like the way the faucet the perversity of that form is [clears throat] throughout her work exists throughout her work. So yeah, she's walking around with the five beta cap capaki and the pearls. The irony, right? But the perverse irony of of that desire to have the desire and also mask it in a particular way.
>> I think >> yeah.
>> Well, I guess I would say I don't know like maybe maybe it's masking it or maybe it's like I'm having an affair with the boys and I'm a five beta kappa.
>> Yeah, >> that's true. Like two things can be true or maybe I'm having an affair with the boys because I'm a five beta tapper.
>> Yeah.
>> Like why not? So I think I think that we are one of the things I think about where we are in this moment is that we can have an appreciation for faucet because we are allowed to have a more capacious sense of it's possible to be all the many things that she was >> and then after this >> get happily married and live and write four more novels. I like that ending too for her, you know. Um, so I think that, >> you know, this is a this is another reason why this is an interesting time >> to be able to reconsider and rethink her as well. I think there's another >> Yeah.
>> So, uh, so I'm here. I'm a friend of one of the panelists and I didn't know Jesse Faucet before I came here tonight, [laughter] but I've been reading uh Tony at Random about Morrison's Adventures at Random House >> and the parallels between the two of them. It's like they're separated by 50 years.
>> So, the question I have is like uh what did what did Morrison make of her?
Because she was a literary giant >> for 50 years. So there was plenty of time for her to have asked that question like why now over the last 30 years of her life. So I'm just wondering >> we've heard uh what some of the men said that were her contemporaries and then you know what Baldwin said and what Ellison said afterwards, but what what did Morrison make of her?
>> I've never heard or read anything that she said about Jesse Faucet. I mean, the only one of the Harlem Renaissance women that I ever heard her talk about or read her talking about was >> Hursten.
>> Um, but never I never heard any neither good nor bad critical or anything.
>> Um, and it's interesting because they both are Cornell grads.
>> Um, Tony gets a master's from Cornell and they both are classics. Um um she's an undergraduate classics minor, >> but um that doesn't mean she didn't say anything. I just I've never read anything about Jesse Faucet, but it might be there in interviews or something. I'm just not familiar.
>> Did you ever I've never read anything that have you?
>> Yeah, I haven't read Morrison say anything about Faucet. But I do think your point is interesting in in as in as far as I know some of the people that Morrison published at Random House, you know, work a day writers like Wesley Brown.
>> Yeah.
>> Um and that's very very it mirrors very obviously what uh Faucet is doing 50 years before. So maybe the commentary is in the practice. Maybe. [laughter] >> Yes.
>> Okay. Um hi. Um I'm Michael M. uh Fbright visiting scholar from Japan um who is who has been studying African-American literature as well as the federal writers project at oral history of Colombia University. Um I've got the question for all. Um actually I don't know well uh I don't know her well so to speak. So um if you were to recommend um one of her works poetry novel anything is fine um to tonight's audience as a first introduction.
What would you choose to help them to know um to know her? Well, um that that is my question.
>> Thank you.
>> I I'd say those I'd say uh well, I'm especially fond of Plum Bun and the China Berry Tree, the second and the third novel.
>> I would say I would say Plum Bun. Um but then go read There is Confusion after Plum Bun. Yeah, I think that's probably the appropriate order.
>> I see.
>> Yeah. Plumb bun, I would say, too. Yeah.
And I'd also say um she also wrote essays. She she wrote about pan-Africanism. I mean, you know, she >> she wrote about so many things, but yeah, Plum Bun is a good start, I think.
Yeah.
>> Understood. Thank you so much.
>> Yeah. Is there I can't see if there's anyone else over here. No. Okay.
One else over here.
>> She has a short story about pajamas.
>> No. Um, I wondered if when we were talk, one final thing I I'll ask for the panel. We talked about the the horrible sort of critical reception. Can you just bring us up to date a little bit about the sort of black feminist response >> um afterwards so that we don't we aren't left with those horrible [laughter] >> misreadings? Um, >> I'm sorry. I thought I I thought I was moving very quickly and I apologize. You didn't bring us some of it, but >> some there the the the ones that I was that I encountered right off the bat were um you know uh Andrew Seal uh the coupling convention um Debbie McDow's from the Changing Same and uh Horten Spiller's essay All the things you could be by now if you s Sigment Freud's wife was your mother.
>> It's a great essay.
>> It's a great essay. [laughter] Um but also just to your point about the later stuff like even Brent Hayes Edwards in uh the practice of diaspora when he does address faucet there's a kind of ambivalence about you know her her place in the renaissance her her place as a writer which is interesting Cheryl Wall has some some ambivalence as well in the women of the Harlem Renaissance but as far as the more recent articles I I mean there I can't I don't remember names. There are a few people who are out there doing some work, but um we we really need that second reconstruction.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. No, I would agree with that. The And ducil the coupling convention, sex, text, and tradition. Um sex, text, and tradition in black women's fiction. Um is is a great book. She has a chapter on the it's called the bourgeoa wedding bell blues of Nella Larson and Jesse Faucet. um which I think is just a fabulous title. Um and that that chapter heavily influenced the way that I was thinking about the book. Um and about faucet generally. Um Deborah McDow, of course, Hortense Spillers. Um >> yeah.
>> Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's I think it's sort of interesting to think about um if if if part of the sort of reticence is um you know, maybe a sense of like sort of respectability or it's not the time to go back to the novel of manners. Um I don't know, maybe maybe it's worth considering what the baby gets that gets thrown out with the bathwater when the sort of emphasis is on um on something else. So my final question, I just also thought that um we often with black women there's only room for one so many times and I think that um the the one who got for a long time the one who got chosen to be talked about was Zora.
>> Hen. Yeah.
>> For for decades and then um after Zora it was Nella Larson. Mh.
>> Um so um so on on this we can close on this um on this celebration of her birthday and um of this anniversary um what is your wish for Jesse Faucet? Your your your closing wish for Jesse Faucet?
>> Well I was attending uh the uh Cornell Black Alumni Association event 50 year anniversary. I was telling all of my classmates what I was doing today and uh they were very excited about many of them weren't familiar with Jesse Faucet.
So, um I think um we need to uh lift the banner and and uh keep um keep um her name uh there and and people wanting to like the women from from uh Japanese um from Japan reading her works and um >> looking them looking at them again.
>> Thank you. Yeah, to echo um my colleague here, I I think uh like this semester I'm teaching a Harlem Renaissance course actually and we're only reading excerpts from Plum Bun and China Berry Tree. It's the first time I've ever I've done this because there's so much to do and in 15 weeks, you know, you want to try to do as much as possible, but I will assign the actual text as I always have in the future, right? I won't do this again.
And I would just I guess my wish is that people would read Jesse Faucet and um and not punish her for not being Zorel Hursten or Nella Larson which [laughter] >> which happened a lot.
>> Yeah. I mean who is it who referred to the phenomenon of Hurstenism?
I can't remember. I think it was Hazel Carboo was like it's like hurstenism.
It's very she's very of the moment in the in the 80s and 90s. Yeah.
>> Right. And I think that like there is something sort of refreshing about thinking about Faucet um not because there's something more valuable about what she's doing, but again to go back to the idea of the sort of diversity of perspectives um on sort of black feminist belonging um and sort of how to navigate modernity. Like I think it's so like beautiful that we have, you know, their eyes were watching God on the one hand and then Plum Bun on the other. Um, you know, quicksand in between like I Yeah. Sorry to, you know, >> why not?
>> And I and I and I also and I, you know, I want her to get hers.
>> Let her get hers. Thank you so much.
>> Thank you.
[applause] >> I I just want to make a few comments.
Not many, but of the comments, I couldn't be prouder of the people on this panel. I think you need they need another round of applause. [applause] >> Thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> Oh, that it's real. You know, um, we tend to hear about writers when they just sort of, you know, talked about Zoran Hursten or Nella Larson. Even at that, I don't think a lot of people find her on their tongues. But [clears throat] we are complex >> and you pull out some a name like Jesse Redmond Faucet for whom many people have never heard of that name and when I say it said, "Well, you know, she's the one who discovered Langston Hughes." And they're like, "What?" [laughter] you know, so you get these responses uh you know, and far as as as the sort of um opposite ends of the spectrum between Faucet and McKay, but she still nurtures McKay.
>> They couldn't be further apart.
>> She still nurtures him. Gan Tumer who decides at some point that he's not going to be black anymore. But even at that, you know, she well he does and he lives off into the wild blue yonder after Kane is published. Um but even him she does same. So I'm thinking about McKay and Tumor and you know there's Langston and there's Cullen. So all of these people whose names, you know, she was busy working with them before what we now know to celebrate the Harlem Renaissance when it jumps off with, you know, the publication and the survey graphics. So, I really am so thrilled about I had to come and sit in the back of the audience because I was having trouble hearing in the back as I was sitting there and I was thinking I I don't how am I missing this? I have to go up there every other word. So, I am I am just thrilled. I'm thrilled because it is important for all of us to knit ideas together. We should all be thinking about something that has nothing to do with you're going to work.
I mean, maybe it's just some idea that you get from coming to the Shamberg and you leave with something that resonates and you say to yourself, how does that work? And you start pulling putting those, you know, just connecting those dots, which is I wish I was sitting in academia all the time. I call myself a you know, an academic without portfolio.
[laughter] >> But I do walk around thinking about how history connects >> and and it connects all the time. It's connected all of us. It connects with Z with uh Jesse Redmond Faucet who after the Civic Club dinner where she realizes she's been sidelined.
A couple of days later, she writes a letter to Arthur. She doesn't say Arturo. The letter is written to Arthur Shamberg. And she says to him in that letter, "Do you remember that a few days ago you said that you would buy 25 copies of my book and I will sign the book to you?" You know, so he's very active about what it means to have and follow through. This is her first novel.
And what an amazing moment for her to be both on top of the world and to realize that maybe something just crushed her.
>> You know, have we gone through that in our own lives?
There are many examples and we are as complex many of us or most of us as perhaps Jesse Redmond Faucet who could wear her pearls and be very conservative but she danced.
>> She danced and so did the boys.
[laughter] >> There you go. who knew or the six [applause] >> and so did Colin. Have you read the letters between him and Darothy West?
>> They danced.
So, for those of you who missed out on the dance last night, we had two bands to celebrate the Seavoy Ballroom because they hung out there. And Seavoi opened in 1926, a hundred years ago.
And all of these people you think about as being so sophisticated, well, they hung out. And they were at the Seavoy Ballroom and in all the other ballrooms in Harlem. So, I think you should take a page from their world and dance >> and realize that you're more than one person.
>> May I read one passage from the from the yearbook? Yeah. at your book editor.
Just one line uh the editor says about Faucet. In spite of her classic tendencies, she has a repertoire of rollicking ragtime, which is the envy of her friends. So that's Cornell 1905.
[laughter] [applause] Well, that's a great note to end on. We have a little bit of something else for you. But uh before I stop speaking, I do want to be sure that you know that you're all invited to the last this there were 10 events. This is number nine. The 10th event will be on Wednesday the 29th at the First Presbyterian Church of New York City in the city of New York on 12th Street and 5th Avenue. The evening begins at six o'clock. You are invited to wear something from the 1920s in honor of Jess's novel 1924.
Anyway, uh wear something and it could be something very simple. Maybe some beads, you know, a little thing in your hair. Anyway, wear something like that and bring a book written by any writer of the Harlem Renaissance. anyone.
You will sit and read silently for one hour. Imagine that. Someone asked you to come and read [laughter] for a whole hour in communion.
>> Sounds great.
>> Oh, that is remarkable. Not your cell phones, an actual book.
And this is [laughter] remarkable.
Anyway, that's what I'm inviting you to do. And you'll do that for an hour. And that one hour will be followed by uh two extraordinary musicians um Brandy Sutton and Joy Brown and their respective accompanists. And we've got the privilege of hearing Dr. Monica L.
Miller who is going to set the stage for entering the new Negro. And then we will be joined in conversation between Dr. Jeffrey Stewart, the author of The New Negro, the life of Elaine Lockach, and Dr. Dev David Levering Lewis. Uh, also Pulit both Stewart and Levering Lewis are both Pulitzer Prizewinning historians and biographers.
Um, Dr. Lewis won two Pulitzers for each of the two volumes of WB de boys, but he also authored, among many other things, when Harlem was in vogue. These events were all free. All you have to do is show up.
>> Thank you, >> Lana. Thank you, Dr. >> [applause] >> Thank you, Dr. Henry, and thank you, Dr. Griffin, and the Honorable Justice James for this wonderful conversation and necessary reread and reook of the canon of Harlem Renaissance writers. Um, if you liked anything that you heard today, there is so much material in our manuscripts, archives, rare books division dedicated to the papers of many of the folks that you heard from. Um, we have Claude McCay's letters, Nella Larson's letters, as well as Web Dubo's papers. Um, all available in our manuscripts, archives, and rare rare books division, which you can visit by appointment, um, if you're curious. And then we hope to see you tomorrow for tomorrow's program honoring the late actor Chadwick Boseman. and this program celebrates our centennial through black through the lens of black theater and black theater history. So, we're excited to celebrate him. And then next week, we'll be showing two films as part of our black onscreen series. Uh the first film is Kathleen Collins's Losing Ground and the second is Maline Hunt Erlick's Cleopatra at the Mall. So, I want to give one last round of applause to our wonderful panelists [applause] before We celebrate Jesse's birthday with a little surprise.
>> We'll have a We'll have a birthday cake.
[laughter] We're ready.
>> And And I know that there's some me there are a few members of the literary society in the audience. Why don't you try to make your way up here so we can all celebrate Jesse?
>> Literary Society members in the audience, please come up.
Oh my goodness, >> my goodness.
>> Oh, it's Oh my gosh. [laughter] >> It's gorgeous.
>> Wow.
>> Wow.
>> Look at that.
>> Wow. That's too beautiful to eat.
>> Beautiful.
>> Look at that.
>> Wow.
>> Spectacular. and Nolla, are you coming up? And the Shamberg the artist [laughter] >> who did that work in >> just come in the spectacular.
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