5 - A “moving mosaic”: Harlem, primitivism, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand

Summary

If, as the preceding chapter suggests, African Americans were discursively excluded from the nation form, they might well form a city. At the time and place of the Harlem Renaissance, multitudes – arriving during the Great Migration northwards – were crucial to Harlem's physical establishment as a black domain. Crowds as residents were essential to Harlem's very definition, to quote James Weldon Johnson's well-known description, as “a city within a city, [as] the greatest Negro city in the world,” as the place that “contains more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth.” To make Harlem “the recognized Negro capital,” Johnson further suggests, African Americans had to become an aggressive crowd of capitalists. He describes the means by which savvy black real estate investors finagled the purchases of property and the rental to other blacks in heretofore white neighborhoods, resulting in a “whole movement [which], in the eyes of whites, took on the aspect of an ‘invasion’; they became panic-stricken and began fleeing as from a plague.” If Johnson expresses some amusement over whites’ mob-like exodus, he equally delights in the behavior of Harlem's new masses – the “colored washerwoman or cook” – who, like the moneyed elite, did their capitalist part. When the “Rev. W. W. Brown, pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Church, repeatedly made ‘Buy Property’ the text of his sermons,” a “large part of his congregation carried out the injunction … Buying property became a fever.”