in the Forethought, “need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?” Du Bois claims a racial and biological affiliation that minimizes the regional, educational, and class differences that distinguished him from the masses of Southern Black slave descendants (209). Where in The Philadelphia Negro he highlights intraracial difference, in this text, written almost contemporaneously, he underscores notions of attachment through kinship.
Stepto argues that “Du Bois’s efforts at binding or combining create expressions of a special unity between ‘we’ and ‘I,’ ‘our’ and ‘my,’ ‘theirs’ and ‘mine,’ that is unquestionably central to the rhetorical and narrative strategies of The Souls and, quite likely, essential to Du Bois’s personal sense of self.”20 This strategy also anticipates the Renaissance project of communal and cultural identity construction. By merging the “I” and the “We,” the individual and the communal, he signals a shift toward the articulation of a common, modern identity emerging from the ashes of slavery. Du Bois turns to the South at a moment when Blacks were beginning to leave the region and its slaveholding legacy in increasingly larger numbers (the trickle he documents will, in a matter of decades, turn into a flood of urban migrants). He documents the development of an expressive culture that held traces of the old and new, the South and the North, the Black and the White. The ongoing importance of these ideas is signaled by the frequent turn by New Negro contributors to the folklore and culture of the African American slaves as a source of artistic inspiration, even as they announce a definitive break from the past.
The Literal and Figurative South
Members of the New Negro Renaissance legitimized the movement’s progressiveness by underscoring the rural, slaveholding South’s setting in the retrograde past; and looking back at the progress narrative intrinsic to the “Hampton Idea,” we can see that this was not a formulation invented by the upwardly mobile African Americans of the 1920s. Du Bois’s response to this impulse, however, was to suggest, through what I call the homecoming trope (in “Of the Coming of John”), that one must first revisit the past in order to move more assuredly into the future.21 The reoccurrence of the Southern home as trope in the literature of the period gives weight to Sterling Brown’s observation that Harlem was not the epicenter of the New Negro Renaissance. He insisted, “the New Negro movement had temporal roots in the past and spatial roots elsewhere in America.”22 Houston Baker provocatively suggests, “Modernism’s emphasis falls on the locative—where one is located or placed—in determining how constricted the domain of freedom might be” (Turning South 69–70). Fiction as diverse as Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Walter White’s Fire in the Flint (1924), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Langston Hughes’s Ways of White Folk (1933), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) repeat and revise Du Bois’s story of education, migration from, return to, and uplift of Southern homes. These narratives of homecoming and cosmopolitan migration constitute a collective, fictive grappling with both the ethnographic imagination and its implications in the complex relations of the “talented tenth” to the “folk” he or she aspires to represent. Especially at this historical moment, the South represents, according to Baker, “a liminal zone, a middle passage of the imagination, a space of performance, a series of peculiar ‘strips’ of interactive behavior where blackness has played or performed toward the scene of modernity” (36). The South was a symbolic location with which New Negro intellectuals constructed and performed modern Black identities.
The social sciences’ emphasis on fieldwork as a fundamental mode of inquiry established the notion of “the field” as isolated, set apart, and uncorrupted by outside communities.23 Yet we should not attribute the place of the South in the Renaissance imagination solely to this fact. Because the Southern Black Belt is a central site of analysis for Du Bois he, as much as a figure like Boas, influenced Harlem Renaissance constructions of New Negro identity in relation to the Southern past. Alain Locke extends Du Bois’s thesis when he argues in “The New Negro,” for example, for the recognition of more progressive, assertive, and urban identified Negro, whose advancement was tied to a revaluation of the artistic and cultural roles Southern Blacks have played in the regional and national scenes. What was needed, in other words, for the advancement of the race, was a reassessment of the value of the culture from which it was born:
It must be increasingly recognized that the Negro has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art, music especially, which has always found appreciation, but in larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways. For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of American which most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament. In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source. (15)
Locke’s identification of the Southern “folk” as a point of orientation for the creation of an African American expressive culture corresponds with and is informed by a period in which Black writers absorbed the idea of the “field” as apart from the real and modern present because of their ethnographic training and/or interests.24 In fact, Du Bois’s representation of the Southern Black Belt anticipates the New Negro consumption of anthropological concepts when, in The Souls of Black Folk, he describes a Southern town as a product of the imagination of modern, urbanized Northerners:
Once upon a time we knew country life so well and city life so little that we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded country district. Now the world has well nigh forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land, without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of sand and gloomy soil. (442)
When writing from a distance, whether geographic or experiential, Du Bois suggests descriptions of the other inevitably leave something lacking because the writer endows them with characteristics of the familiar, or relies on easy stereotype. The city dweller, he implies, may aspire to represent “country life,” but her or she may only be able to imagine a “little city” in which the relational geography assumes the characteristics of life in an urban setting, while at the same time imposing on the landscape stock features of associated with the rural: cotton, corn, and gloomy soil.
The irony is that while Du Bois certainly emphasizes the isolation of Southern towns because of historical circumstances (namely racial segregation), he also stressed its status as an ideal study site because the advent of emancipation allowed for the rapid social transformation of a once oppressed group of individuals. In “The Atlanta Conferences” (1904), for example, he wrote:
The careful exhaustive study of the isolated group then is the ideal of the sociologist of the 20th century—from that may come a real knowledge of natural law as locally manifest—a glimpse and revelation of rhythm beyond this little center at last careful, cautious generalization and formulation. For such work there lies before the sociologist of the Untied States a peculiar opportunity. We have here going on before our eyes the evolution of a vast group of men from simpler primitive conditions to higher more complex civilization. (reprinted in Green and Driver 54)
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