“Better the wound forever seeking balm
Than this gray calm!”
–Jessie Redmon Fauset, from “Dead Fires”
Jessie Redmon Fauset, whose birthday it is today, was a “forgotten writer” for many years, after her heyday in the 20s and 30s. Her work was resurrected by feminist academics and scholars in the 1970s, after which awareness of her has risen (complete with full biographies and critical studies of the groundbreaking aspects of her work at the time when she was writing it).
She was born in 1882. The family she was born into was very large, and somewhat complicated. They lived in poverty. I believe her mother died when Fauset was young, but not before she impressed on her daughter the importance of education. Fauset took the lesson to heart. She was valedictorian of her mostly-white high school class. She set her sights on Bryn Mawr but was rejected due to her race. Cornell, however, accepted this promising young student. At Cornell, she studied classical languages, and went on to get a Master’s in French from the University of Pennsylvania. Fluent to the point where she was bilingual, she visited France often, and ended up translating many black European and African authors into English for the first time.
After getting her master’s she taught French at a prestigious and exclusive black high school in Washington D.C., where poet Anne Spencer was the librarian for 20 years (post about Spencer here). The two knew one another, were colleagues, members of the NAACP, and there’s probably a good story in there about their friendship. During the ‘teens of the 20th century, when Fauset was busy teaching, she spent her summer vacations in France, studying at Le Sorbonne, as well as visiting some of France’s colonies in Africa.
Along with all of this, Fauset began her writing career. She joined the NAACP and started contributing to the organization’s magazine, The Crisis, founded by W.E.B. DuBois. This was around 1917-18. Her op-eds, poems, essays, journalism so impressed DuBois he offered her the job of Editor. She accepted. This began an exciting time, not just for her, but for everyone, what with the explosion of creativity going on (which she helped foster as editor of such an important magazine). She served as editor from 1919 to 1926. During that time, she basically “discovered” Langston Hughes. Hughes said:
“Jessie Fauset at The Crisis, Charles Johnson at Opportunity, and Alain Locke in Washington were the three people who midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and critical—but not too critical for the young—they nursed us along until our books were born.”
DuBois asked Fauset to move to New York when she took the job. She did. This thrust her into the center of the Harlem Renaissance. She was a major figure. As Hughes wrote, she was critical of his writing, but “not too critical”. Most of the black writers she championed were new – with zero experience in being published anywhere. She was often the first editor they encountered. So she was caring and nurturing, but also strict and exacting. In this fashion, she was a great mentor to not only Hughes, but Claude McKay (post about him here), Countee Cullen (post about him here), Jean Toomer (post about him here), her former colleague Anne Spencer.
At the SAME time , she was the co-founder and editor of a children’s magazine called Brownie’s Book (you can read more about Brownie’s Book here). She eventually got a teaching gig at a high school in the Bronx, where she taught French and Latin for 20 years. She also wrote 4 novels in the 1920s and 1930s; these novels took place mostly among the Black middle-class (an unheard-of ‘category’ in literature at the time her novels were published.) The hierarchy of skin color among the Black community was one of her main themes, but she also addressed issues of feminism, economics, as well as what it was like to be part of a generation whose parents and grandparents had been slaves. There can’t be a bigger generation gap than that.
Her first novel, There Is Confusion
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain–
If you want to learn more about this amazingly learned pioneer, in researching this piece I stumbled upon this essay in The New Yorker, which is well worth checking out.
Here are two of her poems, as well as an excerpt from There is Confusion.
Dead Fires
If this is peace, this dead and leaden thing,
Then better far the hateful fret, the sting.
Better the wound forever seeking balm
Than this gray calm!
Is this pain’s surcease? Better far the ache,
The long-drawn dreary day, the night’s white wake,
Better the choking sigh, the sobbing breath
Than passion’s death!
Rondeau
When April’s here and meadows wide
Once more with spring’s sweet growths are pied
I close each book, drop each pursuit,
And past the brook, no longer mute,
I joyous roam the countryside.
Look, here the violets shy abide
And there the mating robins hide—
How keen my sense, how acute,
When April’s here!
And list! down where the shimmering tide
Hard by that farthest hill doth glide,
Rise faint strains from shepherd’s flute,
Pan’s pipes and Berecyntian lute.
Each sight, each sound fresh joys provide
When April’s here.
Excerpt from her first novel There Is Confusion (notice how she gets an entire world and its context and its generation gap into her specific description of one young man’s journey):
But alas for poor Joel! His idea of greatness and his Mammy’s were totally at variance. The kind of greatness he had envisaged had been that which gets one before the public eye, which makes one a leader of causes, a “man among men.” He loved such phrases! At night the little boy in the tiny half-story room in that tiny house in Virginia picked out the stories of Napoleon, Lincoln and Garrison, all white men, it is true; but Lincoln had been poor and Napoleon unknown and yet they had risen to the highest possible state. At least he could rise to comparative fame. And when he was older and came to know of Frederick Douglass and Toussaint l’Ouverture, he knew if he could but burst his bonds he, too, could write his name in glory.
This was no selfish wish. If he wanted to be great he also wanted to do it honestly and faithfully, the things that bring greatness. He was to that end dependable and thorough in all that he did, but even as a boy he used to feel a sick despair,–he had so much against him. His color, his poverty, meant nothing to his ardent heart; those were nature’s limitations, placed deliberately about one, he could see dimly, to try one’s strength on. But that he should have a father broken and sickened by slavery who lingered on and on! That after that father’s death the little house should burn down!
He was fifteen when that happened and he and his mother both went to work in the service of Harvey Carter, a wealthy Virginian, whose wife entertained on a large scale. It was here that Joel learned from an expert chef how to cook. His wages were small even for those days, but still he contrived to save, for he had set his heart on attending a black seminary. Some day he would be a minister, a man with a great name and a healing tongue. These were the dreams he dreamed as he basted Mrs. Carter’s chickens or methodically mixed salad dressing.
His mother knew his ideas and loved them with such a fine, if albeit uncomprehending passion and belief, that in grateful return he made her the one other consideration of his life, weaving unconsciously about himself a web of such loyalty and regard for her that he could not have broken through it if he would. Her very sympathy defeated his purpose. So that when she, too, fell ill on a day with what seemed for years an incurable affection, Joel shut his teeth and put his frustrated plans behind him.
Extraordinary.
It’s the only one of hers I’ve read, and it’s probably the most famous (the Modern Library brought out an edition), but I’m sure her other novels are well worth checking out.
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