The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 33 (2022)

Copyright © 2022 The Japanese Association for American Studies. All rights reserved.

African American Migration Narratives of theHarlem Renaissance: Jazz as a Symbol of Racial
Uplift, “Low-Down” Migrants, and Black Feminism

Yuri SAKUMA*INTRODUCTION
Mobility has been a central theme of African American literature from its
inception. Its expression has taken various forms, from the slave narratives
or neo-slave narratives that describe fugitive slaves escaping from theSouthern plantation to Northern freedom to the migration narratives thathighlight the characters of migrants moving from the South to the Northfor better civil and economic opportunities during the Great Migrationand on to the black Atlantic and diaspora literature that traces internationalmigration in the broader historical context of the Middle Passage, PanAfricanism, and contemporary globalism.1 During the Great Migration,
beginning in the early twentieth century, black music genres—blues andjazz—also emerged as a version of migration narrative that was nurtured
and enjoyed by migrants. Given this thematic overlap, it becomes apparent
that the genres of migration narrative and blues/jazz literature have beenclosely intertwined throughout the African American literary tradition.
In this essay I examine migration and blues/jazz as represented in theliterary and sociological works of the Harlem Renaissance, an African
American artistic and literary movement that emerged in the early twentieth*Professor, Waseda University

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century. The Harlem Renaissance was the period when the themes of
migration and blues/jazz became most prevalent in both literary andsociological works. First, this movement itself was the product of theGreat Migration that brought African American populations to Harlem andestablished that place as an artistic mecca; second, many of the writers ofthe movement, for example, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude
McKay, and Nella Larsen, were also migrants or born to immigrant parents
and had firsthand experience of dislocation; and finally, these writersand elite intellectuals found blues/jazz symbolic of the dramatic changes
brought by the Great Migration and attempted to discover the cultural andsocial significance of this black music. Elite intellectuals started to establish
a sociology of black music as an area for scholarly inquiry, and innovative
writers variously experimented with literary forms by incorporating black
vernacular idioms, including blues and jazz.
Although African American literary studies have long investigated theinteraction of the genres of migration narrative and blues/jazz literaturein this period,2 the focus has often been on male “avant-garde” modernist
writers who openly celebrated blues/jazz. As a result, relatively few
studies have attempted to survey “rear-guard” conservative intellectuals
and women writers and their ambivalent relations to migration andblues/jazz. The Harlem Renaissance was known as the era of “jazzcontroversy,” in which one’s judgment of blues/jazz revealed what kindof aesthetic principle a person believed in (Ogren 3–10). In other words,
the controversy over the meanings of blues/jazz explicated the diversityof aesthetic positions within the black community. In order to better grasp
the diversity of how each writer differently conceived of migration andblues/jazz, I propose a method of comparative analysis of various texts
that transcend the borders of genre, class, and gender, rather than a close
reading of a single text. The works compared in this essay include not only
poetry and a novel (the blues and jazz poems of Sterling A. Brown andLangston Hughes; Nella Larsen’s Quicksand [1928]) but also sociologicalor autobiographical essays (Alain Locke’s “The New Negro” [1925] andThe Negro and His Music [1936]; Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to
Be Colored Me” [1928]). I believe that this method of comparative analysis
will offer expansive yet nuanced interpretations of the various aesthetic
discourses of the Harlem Renaissance in relation to the themes of migration
and blues/jazz.
In this essay I argue that, in each work, the portrayal of migration andblues/jazz establishes a site that expresses its distinctive aesthetic value

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and that, taken together, the comparison of these works brings to light thethree competing and coexisting modes of artistic ideas and ideals of theHarlem Renaissance. The first aesthetic idea is based on the elite ideologyof racial uplift, which equates geographical mobility with the upward social
mobility of migrants into the middle-class and artistic sublimation of black
folk music into high-art music (Locke); the second challenges the elite
ideology of racial uplift and instead values more realistic representations ofworking-class migrants and their “low-down” culture, including blues andjazz (Brown and Hughes); and the third associates blues/jazz with women
migrants’ experiences of sexual objectification as well as black feminist
aesthetics (Larsen and Hurston). These competing and coexisting modes ofartistic ideas and ideals expose the inadequacy of a black/white binary that
presupposes homogeneity of the black artistic community, which highlightsthat the very heterogeneity of the artistic positions was itself a fertile
ground for the construction of African American aesthetics in the 1920s.
The following section provides a historical overview of the Great
Migration and theoretical framework of the African American migration
narrative studies. After the topic was initiated by Robert Stepto, studies ofAfrican American migration narratives were developed during the 1990s
by such scholars as Charles Scruggs, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Lawrence
Rodgers. In 2011, James Smethurst reconsidered migration narratives
within the field of modernist studies, arguing that African American
migration narratives and their portrayals of “fragmented subjectivity andurban alienation” were the roots of American modernism (215). I build on
and hope to add to these studies of migration and modernism by focusing
on the representations of blues/jazz, which I identify as quintessential
migrant and modernist culture. The subsequent three sections offer details
on how each migration narrative expresses the above three aesthetic ideas
and ideals.
I. THE GREAT MIGRATION AND ITS IMPACT ON
AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITIONSThe Great Migration is a pivotal event in African American history after
the Emancipation. From 1890 to 1914, it is estimated that roughly five
hundred thousand African American people migrated from the rural Southto the urban North (Downs 438) and eight hundred thousand in the 1920s(Singh 897). Many historians have indicated two main “push” factors: racial
oppression and the poor agricultural conditions of the South. Driven by

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the feeling of insecurity caused by racial oppression and lynchings, whichwere justified by the Jim Crow laws, and economically devastated by poor
harvests due to the boll weevil epidemic, soil depletion, and flooding of theMississippi River, migrants flocked to Northern cities in search of better
civil and economic opportunities. “Pull” factors included the US entry into
World War I and subsequent immigration restrictions of the 1920s. As many
white male workers left their jobs to join the armed forces and the streamsof European emigrants to the US decreased, defense industries in the North
began to face an increasing need for labor and started to recruit black
Southerners to work in cities. In this way, World War I accelerated the Great
Migration, drastically transforming the economic and social landscape of
the Northern cities.
The Great Migration had an impact not only economically and sociallybut also culturally and artistically. It became a central factor in thecreation of the migration narratives that “portray the movement of a major
character or the text itself from a provincial (not necessarily rural) Southernor Midwestern site (home of the ancestor) to a more cosmopolitan,
metropolitan area” (Griffin 3). Charles Scruggs’s Sweet Home: Invisible
Cities in the Afro-American Novel (1993), Farah Jasmine Griffin’s “Who
Set You Flowin’”: The African-American Migration Narrative (1995),
and Lawrence Rodgers’s Canaan Bound: The African-American Great
Migration Novel (1997) are the pioneering studies, providing insight into
the migration narrative tradition from post-Reconstruction works to suchcontemporary writers as Toni Morrison. In their attempt to investigate thegenre of migration narrative, these studies commonly build on Roberto
Stepto’s From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979).
Stepto is known for his introduction of the South-North axis to African
American narrative studies. In Stepto’s view, a migrant character’s journey
is not only a literal geographical movement but also a symbolic one.
Tracing the narrative patterns of the slave narratives, he argues that slaves’
movement to the North (“ascent”) means their symbolic journey to literacy,
freedom, and individual identity, while their movement from the Northto the South (“immersion”) means their symbolic journey toward “tribal
literacy” and “group identity” nourished in folk communities (167).
Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative best represents the “narrative ofascent,” in which Douglass’s actual movement to the North possesses a
series of symbolic values associated with the conventional imageries of
the rural South and the urban North. As James Smethurst aptly suggests,
Douglass’s journeys were both “physical and spiritual, literal andAFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION NARRATIVES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

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symbolic,” including “the movement from the Eastern Shore of Maryland(by way of Baltimore) to New Bedford, Massachusetts, from slavery
to freedom, from slave/brute to man, from orality to literacy, from themargins to the mainstream, from common man to representative man, frommass man to individual, from a backward past to gleaming modernity”(101). Here, it is important to note that Douglass’s migration symbolizes
his upward social mobility from a “slave” to “man,” as well as his linear
temporal movement from “backward past” to “modernity.” His migration
narrative, then, can be situated within the Western Enlightenment discourse,
in which his geographical mobility means the upward linear progression
into enlightenment and modernity.
Stepto’s narrative of ascent reveals another important fact about the
migration narratives; that is, those migrants to the North, like Douglass
himself, are required to forsake Southern collective culture associatedwith slavery and oppression to create an enlightened self that internalizes
the Western idea of individual self-development. As Stepto suggests, the“hero or heroine of an ascent narrative must be willing to forsake familial
or communal postures in the narrative’s most oppressive social structure
for a new posture in the least oppressive environment—at best, one ofsolitude; at worst, one of alienation” (167). It is only through accepting
the individualization, solitude, and alienation in the symbolic North that
migrant characters can transform themselves from second-class citizens toenlightened political leaders. The climax of the narrative of ascent thus is
the protagonist rising to a higher status as a role model for the entire race,
while, at the same time, becoming separated from his or her communal
South.
II. THE NARRATIVE OF ASCENT AND THE IDEOLOGY OF RACIAL UPLIFTThe narrative of ascent has a structural similarity with the ideology of
racial uplift, the idea that educated middle-class African Americans, oftenlabeled as the “Talented Tenth,” are responsible for the social and moral
advancement of the entire race. W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “The Talented
Tenth” (1903) best represents such an attempt:
Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more
quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy oftalent and character? Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth
civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever

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will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenthrises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground(46–47).
Du Bois believed that the task of the Talented Tenth members is to risehigh on the social ladder and to pull those who are at the bottom rung.
According to Kevin K. Gaines, this sort of uplift ideology was widespreadamong the African American middle-class: “Reflecting both their desire
for social mobility and the economic and racial barriers to it,” aspiring
members “described themselves since the post-Reconstruction era as
middle-class through their ideals of racial uplift, espousing a vision of racialsolidarity uniting black elites with the masses” (2). By this attempt of “classdifferentiation,” they attempted to create a sense of “self-affirmation” and a“positive black identity” that could be accepted by white society (3).
This somewhat assimilationist principle of racial uplift, however,worked to widen the gap between the middle-class and working-classblacks rather than uniting them. Ironically enough, the members of theblack middle-class were afraid of being (mis)identified with working-classmasses, which led them to further internalize and promote the values of theAnglo-American bourgeoisie such as self-help, temperance, thrift, chastity,
patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth, which have longsustained racial, class, and gender differentiation. As a result, they ended up
replicating the racist and sexist logic of the oppressive society (Gaines 3–4).
Here, I would suggest that the idea of racial uplift is parallel in its structure
to that of the narrative of ascent. In both, while an educated few can
exercise geographical and social mobility to be accepted by white people,
they must lose a physical and spiritual connection to working-class people,
becoming alienated or consciously separating themselves from the strugglesof those who are at the bottom of society.
The Harlem Renaissance can be analyzed against the background of
this class hierarchy and disparity within the African American community.
Being initiated by the Talented Tenth represented by Du Bois and Alain
Locke, the Harlem Renaissance was as much a middle-class movement asa racial one. In 1925 when Harlem was emerging as a promised land that
attracted migrants from both within and without the US, Locke published
The New Negro, a critical anthology that informed the beginning and thevarious definitions of the Harlem Renaissance. Although this anthology
is not usually considered as a migration narrative per se, it neverthelessincludes many literary and sociological works that examine the impact ofAFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION NARRATIVES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

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the Great Migration.3 Locke’s own essay “The New Negro,” for example,
contextualizes the Great Migration within the discourse of racial uplift.
He claims that as the “migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city,
hurdle several generations of experience at a leap” (4), the task of artists isto transform the racial stereotypes of inferiority into new images of racial
pride and dignity. Locke goes on to argue that, through various artistic
endeavors, the images of the “Old Negro,” such as “aunties,” uncles,”“mammies,” “Uncle Tom,” and “Sambo” of the Southern premodern
plantation, can be radically transformed into images of the “New Negro”
that reflect middle-class, urban, and modern values (5). By presenting thepossibilities of recreating racial identity, Locke establishes his elite versionof the migration narrative; in this version, the Great Migration embodies asociocultural upward mobility for progress accomplished through conscious
breakaway from images of the oppressive South.
Within this elite version of migration narrative, blues was despised as avulgar music associated with Old Negro stereotypes, but spirituals and jazz
became the target of cultural “ascent” and “uplift.” Locke’s The Negro and
His Music (1936) retrospectively details the possibilities of upward classmobility found in these genres:
If Negro music is to fulfill its best possibilities, Negroes must becomemusical by nurture and not rest content with being musical by nature.
They must build upon two things essential for the highest musicalsuccess; a class of trained musicians who know and love the folk
music and are able to develop it into great classical music, and a classof trained music lovers who will support by appreciation the best in
the Negro’s musical heritage and not allow it to be prostituted by thevaudeville stage or Tin Pan Alley, or to be cut off at its folk roots bylack of appreciation of its humble but gifted peasant creators. (4)Locke encouraged African American classically trained musicians to adapt
black folk materials to transform them into high-cultural forms—opera
and symphony—that are comparable in their artistic quality to that ofWestern classical music. The primary purpose of this musical elevation
was to challenge existing vulgar stereotypes of black music produced bycommercial entertainments such as “the vaudeville stage,” the hybrid ofblack music and minstrel-like shows, and Tin Pan Alley, a white-owned
commercial music industry.
Locke firmly believed in black music’s socio-aesthetic upward mobility.

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Nevertheless, the above passages also show his ambivalent attitude
toward folk music, on one hand, and commercial music, on the other. As
for folk music, Locke seemed to appreciate Southern “peasant creators”
as bearers of the folk tradition, but his appreciation was a form of “rural
folk romanticism,” which led him to “interpret black folk culture less as aliving reality than as residue from a fast-receding past” (Anderson 172).
For Locke and other elite leaders, “the folk” was a conceptual productof their romantic imagination and not actual working-class people who
were the true living inheritors of the folk culture. Locke’s elitism also
prevented him from openly appreciating jazz. Locke himself was a strong
advertiser of some big band jazz organized by respectable band leaders
such as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson, which, he believed, could
be elevated into a high artistic form. However, he consistently took acritical stance toward its commercialization. He distinguished the“healthy
and earthy expression in the original peasant paganism” of jazz from “itshectic, artificial and sometimes morally vicious counterpart which was theoutcome of the vogue of artificial and commercialized jazz entertainment.”
In so doing, he articulated his concern that new “decadently neurotic”
stereotypes were developing around the entertainment jazz scenes while
elite members were struggling to fight against the Old Negro stereotypes(The Negro 86).
As we have seen, Locke’s arguments of migration and jazz reflected theconservative nature of black middle-class uplift ideology. Written within the
narrative traditions of “ascent” that valued upward mobility, his sociologicalmigration narrative presented an aesthetic ideal of assimilation into Westerncultures. For this purpose, it was necessary to disconnect both migrants andjazz from the oppressive and backward imageries of the South and fromvulgar working-class and commercial origins.
III. THE NARRATIVE OF IMMERSION/DESCENT AND “LOW-DOWN” MIGRANTS
From the mid-1920s, younger generations of African American writers
started to create migration narratives that focused on the working-classmigrants whom Langston Hughes called the “low-down folks” (“The Negro
Artist” 1312). In contrast to the elite version of “ascent” and “uplift,” theworking-class version of migration narratives was that of “immersion”
and “descent.” As Stepto theorizes, in the “narrative of immersion,”those isolated and alienated “ascent” characters decide once again to
immerse in the symbolic South in search of their communal ties. Griffin

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reconceptualizes Stepto’s symbolic South as a space of the “ancestor,”
where newly migrated people can be reconnected with their communal
heritage (3). As we will see later, the work of Sterling A. Brown represents
this narrative of immersion.
In addition to the narrative of immersion, I would suggest that theworking-class version can be also characterized as a “narrative of descent,”by which I hope to highlight the moral and social decline of those whohave migrated to urban areas. Although Harlem and other Northern cities
were imagined as the promised land by migrants, in reality, these urban
spaces turned out to be ghettoes where newly arrived migrants were“drawn into the sporting life of sex, drinking, gambling, and ragtime.”
As a result, migration narratives of the 1920s were filled with the“sense of melancholy,” in other words, the “sense of the urban ghetto as
simultaneously new home, refuge, trap, and exile” and as a “destroyer ofblack culture and racial values” (Smethurst 111–12). Hughes’s blues andjazz poems are examples of a narrative of descent, realistically depicting theurban jazz music scene as a site of downward mobility into ghetto and vice.
Importantly, the working-class version of migration narratives often
incorporates blues/jazz not in their high-art forms but in their original
folk or entertainment forms, which leads us to consider that blues andearly jazz were also migration narratives that reflected the living reality of“low-down folks.” Therefore, before examining the works of Brown andHughes, let us take an overview of the tradition of migration narratives inmusic. In the African American musical tradition, the theme of migrationand dispossession appeared in the sacred music known as “slave spirituals.”
As the song title “A Long Way from Home” implies, lyrics of the spirituals
were often about the imaginary journey to “home,” a metaphor for heaven,
where slaves could be liberated from bondage (Wall 31). Unlike spirituals,
secular blues tradition called for freedom of mobility in the real world.
As William Barlow claims, the blues singers “acted as proselytizers of agospel of secularization in which the belief in freedom became associatedwith personal mobility—freedom of movement in this world here and now,rather than salvation in the next” (5). Because many rural blues musicians
were themselves migrants, they were “in the forefront of the exodus; they
were the oracles of their generation, contrasting the promise of freedom
with the reality of their harsh living conditions” (6).
Under the influence of the blues and other music traditions, jazz wasborn in New Orleans and played in the red-light district called Storyville.
In 1917, the US Navy closed Storyville, and many jazz musicians started

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migrating along the Mississippi River toward Chicago and eventually New
York. During the 1920s, when the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissancewere at their peaks, jazz became popular both among black audiences, whomostly consisted of recently arrived migrants, and white audiences, who
flocked to Harlem for exotic entertainment. Blues and piano jazz (stride
piano) were performed in rent parties for black working-class people, andthe more sophisticated big band jazz became spectacular performances
for white audiences in cabarets, saloons, and nightclubs. Despite their
popularity, due to their contiguity to morally questionable activities
such as drinking, gambling, bootlegging, prostitution, and working-classcommercial culture, they were despised by elite blacks as a source of moral
anxiety and threat.
Within this cultural context in which African American elite andworking-class values are competing each other, no one articulated theneed for appreciating the vitality of “low-down folks” and their culture
more thoroughly than Hughes. Hughes famously criticized elite blacks’class-bound approach to art in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”(1926). Here, Hughes accuses the black middle-class of being anaristocracy that, under the rhetoric of racial uplift, shows an assimilationist
tendency: “But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro
art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire topour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and tobe as little Negro and as much American as possible” (1311).
Rather than shying away from “low-down” traditions, Hughes believedthat new generations of artists should celebrate them as a unique racial
heritage. Hughes’s statement “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and thebellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed earsof the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand”(1314) thus became the manifesto that encouraged other writers to write
about blues/jazz and migration from working-class perspectives. McKay,
Brown, and Hurston were among those who perhaps most agreed with
Hughes’s artistic stance. These writers created migration narratives that
self-consciously broke with the ideology of racial uplift and turned insteadfor inspiration to the vernacular, black bohemian, and modernist idiom.
This resulted in a series of migration narratives—The Weary Blues (1925),
Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), andSouthern Road (1932), each of which, by incorporating blues and jazz into
literary forms or contents, explored the lives of working-class migrants. In
these works, geographically upward movement (“ascent” to the North) andAFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION NARRATIVES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

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symbolically downward movement (“immersion” in the symbolic Southor “descent” into vice) are typically juxtaposed to challenge the elite uplift
narratives that tended to deny the latter aspect.
Brown’s blues/jazz poem “Cabaret” included in Southern Road is one
example that portrays a downward movement (“immersion” in the symbolicSouth). The poem is set in a cabaret in Chicago, illustrating a jazz bandand the chorus girls performing for a white audience. Although thesechorus girls are marketed as the “Creole Beauties from New Orleans,” they
are migrants coming from many places “[by] way of Atlanta, Louisville,
Washington, Yonkers.” After describing these girls’ “shapely bodies naked
save / For tattered pink silk bodices, short velvet tights” (111), the poem
goes on to introduce a parallel setting on the Mississippi River watershed
in Arkansas, where “Poor half-naked fools, tagged with identification
numbers, / Worn out upon the levees, / Are carted back to the serfdom”(112). These lines refer to the black sharecroppers and convicts who
were forced into relief work to shore up the levees with their number
tags attached so that they would not try to evacuate from the flood. Here,the poem juxtaposes the Northern chorus girls’ “naked” bodies with theSouthern laborers’ “half-naked” bodies to show that the flood was oneof the causes of migration. In addition, the parallel realities are designed
to defy the idea of racial uplift that requires migrants to break with theoppressive South. In “Cabaret,” even though migrants are physicallyseparated from the South, they cannot psychologically abandon it. As “thejazz band unleashes its frenzy” and the chorus girls start to sing Bessie
Smith’s blues song “Muddy Water” (111), they cannot help but immerse in
the oppressive reality of the South described in the blues song. Soon after
the poem describes the situation of the Southern laborers, “Now that thefloods recede, / What is there left the miserable folk?,” the chorus girls sing
the lines, “Still it’s my home, sweet home” (112). “Cabaret,” as a narrativeof immersion, in this way, foregrounds the shadowing presence of the Southas a symbolic “home” within the background of the urban jazz scene.
Hughes’s The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew are called“nomadic” works that present the themes of dislocation, migration, anddiaspora (Hogan 188). As if to challenge the folk romanticism of the black
elite, Hughes’s blues and jazz poems in these collections present a realistic
portrayal of the downward movement (“descent” into vice), showing
how the geographical dislocation causes the depression of working-classmigrants that eventually invites them into vice activities. The poem “The
Weary Blues” depicts a blues musician, presumably a migrant, who sings

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a melancholy blues song about loneliness: “Ain’t got nobody in all thisworld, / Ain’t got nobody but my self. . . . And I wish that I had died”(The Collected 23). Although this poem does not name the reason forhis depression, other blues poems included in Fine Clothes to the Jew
give a hint. “Bound No’th Blues” shows that the sense of depression iscaused by migration: “Hates to be lonely, / Lawd, I hates to be sad” (TheCollected 114), and “Po’ Boy Blues” writes, “Since I come up North de /Whole damn world’s turned cold” (The Collected 79). These alienatedmigrant characters seem to resemble the elite protagonists of the narrativeof ascent who have been separated from the South, but, unlike the elitecharacters who achieved upward social mobility in the North, Hughes’s
working-class characters lack a desire for upward mobility. Instead, inorder to cope with their sense of depression, these working-class migrant
characters descend into a vice district where they can find nightclubs. As“Harlem Night Club” illuminates, these characters ask the jazz band to“Play, plAY, PLAY!” because, for them, “Tomorrow. . . . is darkness.” Allthey can do is “Joy today!” (The Collected 29). Rather than romanticizing
the folk, Hughes’s poems shed light on the living reality of the urban
working-class migrants who frequented blues and jazz places in search of abrief release from their depressed feelings.
As these examples show, in a working-class version of the migration
narrative, blues/jazz scenes are the literary device used to address thesimultaneous movement in two opposing directions. Geographicallyrelocated upward to the urban North, working-class migrants are, at thesame time, psychologically drawn back to their symbolic home in theSouth, and, at the same time, they have morally fallen to the bottom ofsociety, which is implied in these poems by the presence of an urban vice
district, prostitution, poverty, and economic exploitation of black music
for white entertainment. In this way, the working-class version articulates
its aesthetic ideal—and social imperative—of realistically portraying thepsychological and moral downward movement of the working-class people
rather than ignoring or romanticizing them.
IV. WOMEN’S MIGRATION NARRATIVES—IMMOBILITY, SEXUALIZATION, AND BLACK FEMINISM
Despite the controversy over blues/jazz that reflects the class disparity
among the black community, the elite and the working-class versions are
similar in that both mainly reflect men’s migration. That means, in the genre

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of migration narrative, women’s mobility is less visible or even absent.
In fact, during the Great Migration, “many of the opportunities were firstoffered to men, women were often last to leave the South.” Furthermore,“as mothers and caretakers of the family, they often felt obliged to remain in
the South until they had enough money to establish a new life in the North”(Downs 439). According to Hazel Carby, women’s blues often visualizes
such female immobility. For example, “Freight Train Blues,” recorded byboth Trixie Smith and Clara Smith in 1924, reads, “When a woman getsthe blues she goes to her room and hides” and “When a man gets the blues
he catch the freight train and rides.” Here, the rhymed “opposition between
women hiding and men riding” shows the gendered nature of the Great
Migration (“It Jus’” 477).
Many of the migration narratives take women’s immobility for granted;
however, black feminist scholars have taken the analysis in new directions
by tracing women’s mobility represented in female blues songs andwritings. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels
to Be Colored Me” are important literary examples. In order to reconsider
black women’s (im)mobility represented in these works, let us first look at
the social situation of female migrants during the Great Migration.
In reconsidering the history of black women’s mobility, the existenceof female blues singers cannot be overlooked. According to Carby, in
an era when most women were immobile, female blues singers were theexception, since, as traveling entertainers, they possessed mobility. For
female singers, it was too dangerous to travel using freight train cars. Thus,
they chose a popular entertainment culture, such as traveling tent shows
and vaudeville, as a medium for their mobility. The female blues performedin these traveling entertainment venues were called classic blues, which isregarded by feminist scholars as one of the inceptions of black feminism,
precisely because the “physical mobility of these women” in “Classic
Blues” symbolized the possibility of transcending the limits of conventional
gender roles (“In Body” 180).
Northern entertainment industries gave geographical mobility not
only to female blues singers but also to young black women by offering
jobs as dancers and chorus girls in urban cabarets and nightclubs. This,
however, produced the negative effect of objectifying black female bodies
as both morally dangerous and overtly sexual. First, women’s migrating
bodies “generated a series of moral panics” among middle-class membersof the black community. As young migrant women found jobs in urban
entertainments, middle-class blacks started to view this as a threat to38

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female respectability, and, as a result, migrant women were often viewed
as candidates for fallen womanhood who were “sexually degenerate”
and “socially dangerous” (Carby, “Policing” 739). Second, the moral
panic was further compounded by the sexualization of women’s bodies
in entertainment venues. From the mid-1920s, jazz was marketed as anentertainment show called “jungle music,” which was meant to evoke
imageries of the uncivilized South and exotic Africa by means of displaying
the exposed bodies of the chorus girls, who consisted of light-skinned
dancers under twenty-one years of age. Jazz and its staging of primitivism
were complicit with the objectification of these women’s bodies as overtly
sexual, uncivilized, and primitive.
Given these aspects, during the 1920s, blues/jazz possessed two symbolic
meanings—women’s mobility and objectification. Within this historicalcontext, Larsen and Hurston respectively offered feminist responses tojazz in their migration narratives. In both narratives, primitive jazz isrepresented as a site of descent into female moral degeneration; however,while Larsen’s protagonist rejects jazz and the sexual objectification of herbody, Hurston’s accepts the objectification to transform the very oppressive
site into an empowering site for reconstructing and reclaiming her racialand sexual identity.
Larsen’s migration narrative Quicksand expresses the female
protagonist’s ambivalent attitude toward migration and jazz. The
protagonist Helga Crane is an immigrant who journeys from a black school
somewhere in the South where she works as a teacher to Chicago and thento New York, Copenhagen, and eventually to Alabama, hoping to discovera place where she can belong. Helga’s desire for belonging derives fromher loneliness. Born of a Danish immigrant mother and a West Indian
father, Helga is neither white nor black, which prevents her from belonging
permanently and completely to any conventional community. In short,
Quicksand documents Helga’s “be/longing”—her constant longing tobelong somewhere.
As an endless migration narrative, Quicksand shows that Helga’s
difficulty with permanent belonging derives from the constant sexualizationof her body that mirrors her exotically attractive subject position as a young
and beautiful mulatto and as an international migrant. For example, soonafter she arrives in Denmark, the home of her mother, Helga realizes that
her body becomes an exotic object. Helga’s Danish uncle insists that Helgais “a foreigner, and different,” saying that “[y]ou must have bright things to
set off the color of your lovely brown skin. Striking things, exotic things”

AFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION NARRATIVES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

39(84). After leaving Copenhagen, Helga returns to New York and finds
solace in a storefront church where she meets Reverend Pleasant Green,
an Alabama preacher, and decides to marry him and return to the South.
However, her sexuality is exploited by her husband. After delivering fourchildren in rapid succession, Helga experiences profound disillusionment,
and yet, because of her weak health, she is unable to move any more.
Quicksand, as a feminist novel, is written within and against the narrative
traditions of both “ascent” and “immersion” to critically expose the ways
in which a young black woman’s geographical mobility—whether it is“ascent” or “immersion”—does not guarantee her social upward mobility
nor her spiritual connection with Southern communal values. On thecontrary, the novel cautions that women’s migrating bodies are constantly
faced with the danger of objectification whenever they are exposed toothers’ gaze. As a result, just as the title Quicksand implies, women
migrants degenerate in a downward spiral and, at worst, into an oppressive
immobility implied by Helga’s social death.
The scene of the New York cabaret is designed to elaborate the theme of
women’s objectification. In the cabaret, Helga is absorbed by the sound ofjazz:
She was drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music, blown
out, ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild murky orchestra.
The essence of life seemed bodily motion. And when suddenly themusic died, she dragged herself back to the present with a conscious
effort; and a shameful certainty that not only had she been in thejungle, but that she had enjoyed it, began to taunt her. She hardened
her determination to get away. She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle
creature. (89–90)
In this memorable scene, the narrator of this novel calls jazz music a“moving mosaic” and a “motley” that includes “Africa, Europe, perhaps
with a pinch of Asia” (90). Despite jazz’s association with mobility andheterogeneity, which arguably becomes an apt metaphor for Helga’s
migrating life, Helga is ashamed of the way she has “enjoyed” jazz, the“jungle,” and she consciously estranges herself from it. Helga sees herself
as a respectable woman, so when she says to herself that she is not “a jungle
creature,” this can be interpreted as a rejection of being overtly sexualized
as a primitive being. Here, Helga is faced with what Carby calls “moral
panics.” Larsen’s elaboration of the jazz scene is actually much more

40

YURI SAKUMA

complex than the above interpretation, given the differing perspectivesof the narrator and Helga, but, for now, suffice it to say that Quicksand
foregrounds the perspective of the middle-class woman, and, as such, it has
to reject jazz as being a site of sexual degeneration.
Helga’s denial of jazz implies that, in order to be respectable, she
has to repress her inner desire and sexuality, which are about to erupt
in the cabaret. Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” presents
another option for a black woman; that is, to reclaim her inner desire andsexuality, which are usually policed to be repressed. Hurston’s approachis different from that of Larsen, and one of the reasons for this differenceis “suggested by the affinity between Hurston’s aesthetic and that of theblues singer” (Wall 140). In a period when the representations of black
women’s sexuality were taboos, “the blues constitute a privileged discursivesite” for expressing female desire and sexuality (Davis xvii). Just likethe female blues singers who identified their mobility and sexuality as “atangible expression of freedom” (Davis 8), Hurston links her character’sgeographical mobility with her freedom to reconstruct and reclaim women’s
inner desire and sexuality.
The protagonist of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is Zora, afictionalized version of Hurston, who is born in the “little Negro town ofEatonville, Florida” (1030) and transfers to a school in Jacksonville, aninter-racial city. She spends her college years in Barnard, a white college
in New York City. Zora’s migration from Florida to New York, as wellas her transition from a black-only town to an inter-racial city to a whiteonly university, is designed to reveal that her racial identity is differently
constructed as she migrates. Just as Zora explains, “I remember the very
day that I became colored”; it is not until she arrives at the inter-racial
city of Jacksonville that she recognizes her racial identity as an African
American (1030). When she enters the white college, she says that “I feelmost colored” being “thrown against a sharp white background” (1031). By
showing how Zora is differently “colored” in different geographical locales,
the essay reveals that racial identity is not a biological essence but a social
construct.
The jazz scene also reveals the constructed nature of racial and sexual
identity. In “The New World Cabaret,” where Zora visits with her whitefriend, she is immersed in the jazz music:
This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks
the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks

AFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION NARRATIVES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

41

through the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them
exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shakemy assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeooww! I
am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red
and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing likea war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death towhat, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra
wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer
we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting
motionless in his seat, smoking calmly. (1032)
As many have argued, in the above scene, Hurston’s language is filledwith primitive and atavistic imageries. Jazz and its uncivilized blackness
are contrasted with the whiteness of the “veneer we call civilization.”
Moreover, Zora’s heathen dance and yell evoke the stereotype of black
women’s rampant sexuality. With all these descriptions, Hurston’s jazzscene seems to replicate the negative “Old Negro” stereotypes ascribed to
African American people from slavery.
As Barbara Johnson suggests, however, one can also argue that, in
her writing, Hurston intentionally staged and performed the primitivism
that her white readership expected. To prove this, Johnson focuses on thepassage, “My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue,”claiming that the “colors that come in the passage are skin paint, not skincomplexion: red, yellow, blue, and purple,” and this indicates that “themove into the jungle is a move into mask; the return to civilization is areturn to veneer. Either way, what is at stake is an artificial, ornamental
surface” (283). Following Johnson’s argument, here again, the essay
emphasizes that one’s racial identity is an artificial construct rather thanbiological essence.
The same thing applies to the portrayal of Zora’s sexuality. As wehave seen, Zora’s atavistic performance recalls the stereotypes of black
women’s uncivilized sexuality. At the same time, however, her performanceworks to disclose the strategically staged and performed aspects of thesestereotypes. In other words, the images of black women’s sexuality havebeen artificially constructed by others, but, just like racial stereotypes,
these images can be modified and redefined not by others but by Zora
herself. In this line of reading, the phrase “I want to slaughter something”
can be interpreted as a declaration to bring death to the conventional black
woman’s stereotype. Another phrase, “I am in the jungle and living in the42

YURI SAKUMA

jungle way,” highlights the necessity of transcending the narrow social
definition of race and gender and living with the possibility of reclaiming
one’s identity as freely as possible. Here, the “jungle” no longer indicatesan objectification of women’s body; rather it signifies an alternative sitewhere black women’s sexuality is reconstructed and reclaimed. In fact, after
this jazz scene, Zora mentions that the “cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to
no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (1032).
The “cosmic” self that is defined as neither “race nor time” alludes to a newform of self-identification that is released from the history of racist andsexist discourses imposed by others.
Larsen’s migration narrative critically reveals the sexual objectificationof migrating women from a middle-class perspective, and Hurston’s
work attempts to reconstruct and reclaim women’s sexuality from a blues
feminist perspective. Although Larsen and Hurston seem to offer different
options for dealing with women’s objectification in the scenes of jazz,
their works similarly problematize the highly gendered nature of mobility
and jazz, providing the framework for developing their black feminist
aesthetics.
CONCLUSION
Through the comparative analysis of literary and sociological works,
which simultaneously explore the themes of migration and blues/jazz,in this essay I have mapped three competing aesthetic discourses of theHarlem Renaissance. In these works, migration and blues/jazz constitute a
symbolic site that expresses the idea of racial uplift (Locke’s narrative of“ascent”), the living reality of “low-down” migrants (Brown’s and Hughes’s
narrative of “immersion” and “descent”), and black feminist sensibility(Larsen’s and Hurston’s feminist interpretations of migration narratives).
As a conclusion, I would add that these three aesthetic discourses are notalways clearly distinguishable, since, sometimes, these different views
overlap and coexist with one another even in a single work.
From a broader historical perspective, these competing modes ofaesthetic discourse were passed on to the later migration narratives thatincorporated blues/jazz. To name a few, Ann Petry’s The Street (1946),
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”(1957), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and Toni Morrison’s Jazz
(1992). Of course, to grasp the whole genealogy of the interaction of thegenres of migration narrative and blues/jazz literature is beyond the scope

AFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION NARRATIVES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

43

of this essay. However, as part of my larger research project related toconstructing the historiography of migration and blues/jazz narratives, thiseffort to map the diversity of the aesthetic positions of the 1920s serves
as a necessary first step. It was during this crucial era that both the Great
Migration and jazz (as popular music) were initiated and reached one of
their peaks.
NOTES
1
For a discussion of black Atlantic and diaspora literature, see Gilroy and Birdsong and
Nwankwo.
2
For a discussion of migration narratives, see Stepto, Grriﬁn, Rodgers, Smethurst, andScruggs. For a discussion of blues/jazz literature, see Anderson, Baker, Carby, Grandt,
Jimoh, Lowney, Pavlić, Vogel, and Werner.
3
The New Negro includes both migration narratives and sociological studies on
migration: Rudolph Fisher’s “The City of Refuge” and “Vestige” and Jean Toomer’svignettes “Carma” and “Fern” foreground the theme of migration. Charles S. Johnson’s“The New Frontage of American Life” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Harlem: The Cultural
Capital” include sociological analysis of the Great Migration.

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