ABSTRACT

The division of 'Harlem Renaissance' is even more misleading because not all writers of color lived in New York. In Harlem, the Negro was no longer the minority. Fitzgerald's naming this decade "The Jazz Age" underscored the centrality of black music and its importance to cultures both here and abroad. As Thadious Davis has recently pointed out, none of the 1920s African American writers considered themselves professionals. Using as illustration William Carlos Williams, whose Puerto Rican mother was descended from Jewish, and perhaps black, lineage, Smethurst incorporates many of Williams's descriptions of African American characters within his poems. Never didactic, Toomer's Cane explores the sexual lives of African Americans, and much of its narrative is expressed from a male perspective although many of its characters are female. Sara Blair describes the way Harlem came to work. She notes in a recent essay that Like the Village, Harlem in its 1920s heyday boasted a spectacular salon life.