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.
To say that Miss Fauset is inferior as a novelist to Jane Austen misses the point. My family’s history may be less illustrious (or notorious) than that of the Rockefellers, but it means infinitely more to me; it undergirds a goodly part of who I am, and to be ignorant of one’s forebears is to be forever anchorless, unmoored, “free” only in the sense that one is “free-fallin,” as the song goes. “Grandfather’s chair may be a very humble piece of furniture,” wrote the turn-of-the-century education reformer John Kennedy of good old Batavia, New York, “but it is prized beyond all price because it is grandfather’s chair.” This is why children in the schools of my Upstate New York should be reading Walter D. Edmonds, while young scholars in Camden should enter the fictive world of Jessie Fauset.
A localized Aframerican-centric education would find children of Philadelphia awash in Fauset and the lads at Dunbar High reciting the poetry of the school’s eponym; boys and girls in Rochester would celebrate Frederick Douglass Day rather than Martin Luther King Day, and no one would graduate the Cleveland schools without a thorough grounding in Langston Hughes.
Jessie Fauset’s friend, the poet Countee Cullen, memorably wrote:
Yet I do marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
If it makes our young poets proud of their blackness, their ancestors, their heritage, and it bid them sing, then let us praise Afro-centrism!
Peace in River City
The American Conservative, 2011
Our daughter will be spending the snowy months rehearsing her role as Marian the Librarian in her high school’s production of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, that tuneful Iowa-placed warhorse—no, parade horse—of community theater. (The flaw in community theater is that while the actors are drawn from the community, the playwrights seldom are.)
It’s been an autumn of imposture, as my wife played the lead in a sharply observed one-act, “Blind Date,” by the late great Horton Foote of Wharton, Texas, whom a friend calls “the last straight man in American theater,” by which she does not mean that he set up punch-lines for comics. The Internet, I learned, is not wholly useless: Lucine created her accent by watching Lady Bird Johnson clips on youtube. You remember Lady Bird: the cuckquean who had the gall to scold Americans about the ugliness of highway billboards while her grotesque husband was ordering the murder of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Americans in Southeast Asia. There are degrees of ugliness, Bird.
In 1966, LBJ appointed Meredith Willson to the National Council on the Humanities, but hey, everybody’s imperfect. And that was the last time Mason City, Iowa, would ever have a voice in government-subsidized culture. Although Meredith had long since lit out for Southern California, the notes in his head were always Iowan. He was said to have been the largest baby (fourteen pounds, six ounces) born in Iowa, which perhaps justified that superfluous L in his surname. Meredith Willson’s father, an attorney, had played baseball at Notre Dame, where he was taught to throw a curveball by the inventor of that pitch, Candy Cummings. Meredith’s sister, Dixie, a literate Ziegfield Follies chorine and silent-movie screenwriter, wrote the oft-anthologized poem that begins “I like the fall/The mist and all.”
So the Willsons were one of those families of talented eccentrics, some grounded and some not, who grow like beautiful weeds whenever small-town America is left alone to develop in its own way, in its own time.
Mason City also gave us Hanford MacNider, national commander of the American Legion in the 1920s and a believer in “Iowa as the Promised Land.” The Legion once was a potent lobbyist for loot, though veterans’ benefits were meager recompense to those who came home legless or armless or blind or insane from the single-L Wilson’s War to End All Wars. MacNider, a banker, introduced the most un-Mr. Potterish “Iowa idea,” which required each Legion post to “make some unselfish contribution to its community’s welfare each year or lose its charter.” I’d say ninety years of sponsoring American Legion baseball teams is a pretty fair contribution.
Peace has long been an Iowa idea as well. Hanford MacNider was given to such craven and anti-American utterances as “I am . . . unwilling to commit my sons or any American’s sons to the policing of the rest of the world.” Traitor! MacNider played football at Harvard and earned a chestful of medals in both world wars, but he had an Iowa isolationist streak that such he-men as Lindsey Graham and Rick Santorum would find suspiciously girlish.
Iowa isolationism was also embodied, in rather different bodies, by the New Left historian William Appleman Williams of Atlantic, Iowa, and by Barry Goldwater-Eugene McCarthy supporter Donna Reed of Nishnabotna, Iowa. (I’ll bet Donna could have thrown a mean curveball, too; watch her fling that rock through the upper window of the old Granville house in It’s a Wonderful Life.)
I devoted a chapter to Iowa’s prewar culture—Grant Wood, Jay Sigmund, Ruth Suckow, Marvin Cone—in my book Look Homeward, America (2006). Its artistically fecund soil was so much richer than barren Manhattan. And it produced worthy political leaders, too, from the cantankerous Old Right skinflint H.R. Gross to the radical farm crusader Milo Reno.
Meredith Willson seems to have been fairly apolitical, though he did, mind-bogglingly, compose a march commissioned by President Ford for that phlegmatic Michigander’s Whip Inflation