impinged young Jessie met the usual slights. At the Philadelphia High School for Girls, “I happened to be the only colored girl in my classes . . . and I’ll never forget the agony I endured on entrance day when the white girls with whom I had played and studied through the graded schools, refused to acknowledge my greeting.”
Upon graduation from Cornell, Jessie Fauset taught French for a dozen years at Washington, D.C.’s storied Dunbar High (“The Greatest Negro High School in the World”), named after the turn-of-the-century black American poet best remembered for his exclamation, “I know why the caged bird sings!”
Fauset chose W. E. B. DuBois as her mentor. He, in turn, recognized his protégée as a distaff member of the “talented tenth” whose efforts DuBois believed would uplift the race. We must, Jessie lectured the usually unlecturable DuBois, “teach our colored men and women race pride, self-pride, self-sufficiency (the right kind) and the necessity of living our lives, as nearly as possible, absolutely, instead of comparing them always with white standards.”
Fauset wrote stories, reviews, and poetry for The Crisis, the NAACP flagship, before becoming full-time literary editor in October 1919. She worked alongside the prickly DuBois for seven fruitful years, though her own experiences of the richness of segregated black middle-class life kept her from swallowing whole the white-subsidized NAACP’s integrationist panacea.
Jessie Fauset disdained literary politics and petty jealousies. As a wise older brother counsels in her first novel, There Is Confusion (1924), “Our battle is a hard one and for a long time it will seem to be a losing one, but it will never really be that as long as we keep the power of being happy. . . . Happiness, love, contentment in our midst, make it possible for us to face those foes without. ‘Happy Warriors,’ that’s the ideal for us.”
Fauset walked it like she talked it. Her little kindnesses and generous praise encouraged the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. She was, arguably, the discoverer of Langston Hughes, who was forever grateful. (“I found Jessie Fauset charming—a gracious, tan-brown lady, a little plump, with a fine smile and gentle eyes. . . . From that moment on I was deceived in writers, because I thought they would all be good-looking and gracious like Miss Fauset.”) Even the rouge et noir bad boy Claude McKay said of Fauset: “All the radicals liked her, although in her social viewpoint she was away over on the other side of the fence.”
Few, it seemed, wanted to hear about Jessie’s side of the fence. There Is Confusion was rejected by one publisher because, Fauset was told, “White readers just don’t expect Negroes to be like this.” Her black characters are often prosperous doctors, caterers, and modistes: the sort who have, rather than are, domestic help. There is a staidness, a steadiness about them, but they are no Oreos. They are securely colored and securely American. Or as the dancer Joanna Marshall informs a theater full of nonplussed whites: “I hardly need to tell you that there is no one in the audience more American than I am. My great-grandfather fought in the Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War, and my brother is ‘over there’ right now.”
A French dance instructor in There is Confusion conjectures “that if there’s anything that will break down prejudice it will be equality or perhaps even superiority on the part of colored people in the arts.” But it has to be on colored people’s terms, in one of their own vernaculars. Jessie Fauset would not beam with pleasure if she knew that seventy years hence a blanched Michael Jackson would make millions of dollars for a Japanese corporation by singing “ain’t no difference if you’re black or white,” which she knew to be a lie.
Her four novels frequently feature tragic light-skinned African Americans who “pass” for white in a burlesque of the integrationist dream. “Emotionally, as far as race was concerned, she was a girl without a country,” Fauset mourned for one such woman in her final novel, Comedy: American Style (1933). “Later on in life it occurred to her that she had been deprived of her racial birthright and that that was as great a cause for tears as any indignity that might befall man.”
Jessie Fauset’s ardent hope was that African American boys and girls be raised in the fullest knowledge of that birthright. In There Is Confusion Joanna comes home from school and asks plaintively, “Didn’t colored people ever do anything, Daddy?” Her father then tells her “of Douglass and Vesey and Turner. There were great women too, Harriet Tubman, Phyllis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, women who had been slaves, he explained to her, but had won their way to fame and freedom through their own efforts.”
It was for the Joannas of America that Fauset and DuBois edited The Brownies’ Book, an unprofitable monthly published from January 1920 until it folded two years later. This wholesome hodgepodge of homilies, lore, and biography was dedicated, Fauset rhymed:
To children, who with eager look
Scanned vainly library shelf, and nook,
For History or Song or Story
That told of Colored Peoples’ glory.
The publication’s purpose, declared the editors, was:
To make colored children realize that being “colored” is a normal, beautiful thing.
To make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race.
To make them know that other colored children have grown into beautiful, useful, and famous persons.
To teach them delicately a code of honor and action in their relations with white children.
To turn their little hurts and resentments into emulation, ambition, and love of their homes and companions.
To point out the best amusements and joys and worthwhile things of life.
To inspire them to prepare for definite occupations and duties with a broad spirit of sacrifice.
Fauset devoted her career to acts of ancestor worship, of recovery and restoration. She translated Haitian poets. When her sister died she endowed a “Helen Lanning Corner” in the public school in which Mrs. Lanning had taught; this room was “to contain books only about colored people, especially colored children.” She sponsored similar rooms in other schools. In 1932 Fauset insisted, “No part of Negro literature needs more building up than biography. . . . It is urgent that ambitious Negro youth be able to read of the achievements of their race. . . . There should be some sort of Plutarch’s Lives of the Negro race. Someday, perhaps, I shall get around to writing it.”
She didn’t. A marriage—a happy, companionable union—intervened, and the illnesses of various relatives brought out the nurse in Jessie Fauset. She published no books between 1933 and her death in 1961. Unlike Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset has enjoyed no spectacular revival—nor, given the unfashionableness of her resolutely middle-class African American subjects, is she likely to.
Yet the better Afrocentric curricula are Helen Lanning Corners. The surge of interest in such distinct cultural achievements as baseball’s Negro Leagues is very much in the Fauset stream. Every Ohio boy reading Langston Hughes is her son: every black girl who feels a confident, bitterless pride in her race and her country is a daughter of Jessie Fauset.
An authentic black pride (or Bayou pride or Brahmin pride or Bay City pride) needs no sugarcoating. Fauset averred, “The successful ‘Negro’ novel must limn Negro men and women as they really are with not only their virtues but their faults.” What would she think of the cartoon Negroes manufactured by today’s white-run entertainment industry?
The present obscurity of Jessie Fauset suggests that Afro-centric (or, better, Aframerican-centric) education has not gone far enough.
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