Please let our hostess know if you are unable to attend. Stay warm and safe out there! x Jacquie
Frances’ Minutes Eleven members and one associate met in Gita’s sunroom. A cozy place to watch the ice floes on the Hudson River. Joanna rang the bell, business began. The terms of president and vice-president are ending; Joanna has appointed a nominating committee to fill the positions. The committee is Carol, Connie, Jacquie. Several changes made in hostesses. Next meeting Feb 18, will be at Christine’s. The March 4 Annual Meeting will be at Laura’s; lunch will be served. April 8 will be at Joanna’s; it will be a brown bag lunch.
Lori reported our treasury was, as it has consistently been since donating to the Hastings library, $113.12.
A couple of recommendations: Frances thought the Broadway musical Maybe Happy Ending wonderful. Connie recommends two films: A Private Life and Sentimental Value.
The full title of Laura’s presentation was “Three African-American Writers of the Twentieth Century, or Books Not Taught.” Those were Cane by Jean Toomer, Passing by Nella Larsen and Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. Of the three, Laura had only read The Invisible Man decades ago, when work and family gave her no time to concentrate.
Laura began with Jean Toomer’s Cane. She showed us one version of the novel; more than ¾ of the book was analysis and criticism. Cane is composed of sketches and poems, a sequence of scenes and portraits, modernist in style, moving from rural Georgia to Chicago and back. Toomer’s work has received much attention since it was first published in 1923.
Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington DC. Toomer’s father had been born a slave who as an adult occasionally passed as white. Toomer’s mother’s forebears were of mixed race and Creole. Toomer resisted racial classification, considered he was “a representative of a new emergent race-a combination of various races.”
Toomer’s formative years were turbulent. He went to six different colleges but never obtained a degree. He worked odd jobs, published essays in a socialist paper. In 1921 he took a job as the principal of a new agricultural and manual labor college for Black-Americans in Sparta, Georgia. Jim Crow laws were violently enforced; lynchings frequent.
Toomer composed most of Cane during that time. He saw beauty as well as cruelty around him. His poem “Karintha” repeats: “her skin is like dusk when the sun goes down.” In November Cotton Flower, he writes “Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear”
He died in 1967.
Passing was recommended by a former student of Laura’s, who had returned to Hastings HS to teach.
Nella Larsen was born in 1891 in Chicago. Her mother was Danish, her father from the West Indies. Passing is an imaginative recreation of the fluidity of race, which Larsen knew well.
Larsen studied nursing at Lincoln Hospital and began working there. In 1919, she married a prominent Black physicist; they moved to Harlem, became part of the Harlem Renaissance. She published her first novel in 1928. Shortly after, learning of an affair of her husband’s, she separated from him. In 1929, she published Passing.
The novel is about two childhood friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who reconnect as adults. Clare passes as white and has even married a white racist. Irene identifies as Black. Clare lives under pressure of concealment. Yet she wants to know more about and to be a part of Harlem’s high life. She sees the friendship with Irene as a pathway. Irene senses the risk Clare is taking, avoids her. Clare comes uninvited to a Harlem party; Irene and her husband are there. The sixth-floor apartment is hot and crowded. Clare’s husband has followed her; he bursts in on the party, enraged, shouting. Clare jumps, or falls, we’re not certain, from an open window.
Larsen’s writing life ended abruptly when she was accused of plagiarizing a story. She divorced; she left her work as a librarian to return to nursing. At her funeral, colleagues came, but no family or friends.
Ralph Ellison was introduced with a quote from The Invisible Man “…one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going.”
Ellison was born in 1913 in Oklahoma City. Ellison was not a good student, he applied 3 times to Tuskegee Institute before being admitted. He left without getting a degree, he went to NYC to study sculpture, in 1936. Living in Harlem, he made important contacts: Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks, and critically, Richard Wright, who encouraged Ellison to write fiction.
The Invisible Man was published in 1952 to popular and critical success; it was given a National Book Award. The first-person narrator, never named, begins his story from a coal cellar where he is hiding from a political rival who intends to kill him. The most heart wrenching scene is of an old couple being evicted from their Harlem apartment, she sobbing, he leaning on his cane. A crowd stands around, watching. The narrator yells “put the furniture back in the house … make their home again!” Ellison could create drama and character, he makes us feel, with first person immediacy, the injustices of racism and of poverty.
Laura concluded, “I only hope that we will find our way… to resist what is happening now and that we can put the furniture back…and right some of the many wrongs we see today.”
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