Slide 1

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 2

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 3

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 4

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 5

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 6

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 7

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 8

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 9

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 10

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 11

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 12

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 13

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 14

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 15

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 16

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?


Slide 17

Test #1
Harlem Renaissance
English Department, Rutgers
Fall 2010

Part 1:
Identifications
Instructions: After reading the passage,
circle the choice that accurately reflects
its author and the work from which it
came.

Question 1
I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a
little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and
Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and
exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall
newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily,
with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out
from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no
desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a
region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That
sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even
beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this
fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for,
and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine.

A) Black no More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
C) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Claude McKay
D) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois

Question 2
The radical labor organizer, refused
permission to use the Knights of Nordica
Hall because he was a Jew was prevented
from holding a street meeting when
someone started a rumor that he believed
in dividing up property, nationalizing
women, and was in addition an atheist. He
freely admitted the first, laughed at the
second and proudly proclaimed the third.
That was sufficient to inflame the mill
hands, although God had been strangely
deaf to their prayers, they owned no
property to divide and most of their women
were so ugly that they had no fears that any
outsiders would want to nationalize them.
The disciple of Lenin and Trotsky vanished
down the road with a crowd of emaciated
workers at his heels.

A) Black No More by George Schuyler
B) Home to Harlem by Claude Mckay
C) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B.
Du Bois
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 3
But the Congo remained in spite
of formidable opposition and
foreign exploitation. The
Congo was a real throbbing
little Africa in New York [.…]
The Congo was African in
spirit and color. No white
persons were admitted
there. The proprietor knew
his market […] you would go
to the Congo and turn rioting
loose in all the tenacious
odors of service and the
warm indigenous smell of
Harlem.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
C) “What if Africa to Me” by Countee
Cullen
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 4
This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that
the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the
European immigrant after two or three generations of
exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral
crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from
the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the
influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer
must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to
what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred
years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark
brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American.
Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country
talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers
with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the
Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic
and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion
that the black American is so "different" from his white
neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the
word "Negro" conjures up in the average white American's
mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima,
Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various
monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

A) “Introduction” to The New
Negro by Alain Locke
B) Black no More by George
Schuyler

C) “The Negro Art Hokum” by
George Schuyler
D) “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain” by
Langston Hughes

Question 5
After adornment the next most striking
manifestation of the Negro is
Angularity. Everything the Negro
touches becomes angular. In all
African sculpture and doctrine of
any sort we find the same thing.
Anyone watching Negro dancers will be
struck by the same phenomenon.
Every posture is another angle.
Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieve
by the very mean which an
European strives to avoid.

A) “The Characteristics of Negro
Expression” by Zora Neale Hurtson.
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) “Introduction” to the New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston

Question 6
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

C) “If We Must Die” Claude McKay
D) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay

Question 7
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air
Ever times the trains pass
I want to go somewhere

A) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
D) “Spunk” by Countee Cullen

Question 8
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate
the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand. Let
Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph
Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and
Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of
their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who
create now intend to express our individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand
on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

A) Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
B) “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain” by Langston Hughes
C) Introduction” to The New Negro by
Alain Locke
D) Black no More by George Schuyler

Question 9
Bow down my soul and let the wondrous light
Of Beauty bathe thee from her lofty throne
Bow down before the wonder of man’s might.
Bow down in worship, humble and alone;
Bow lowly down before the sacred sight
Of man’s divinity alive in stone

A) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
B) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
C) “Homesick Blues” by Langston
Hughes
D) “If we Must Die” by Claude McKay”

Question 10
What is Africa to me:
Cooper sun, a scarlet sea,
Jungle star and jungle track,
Strong bronzed men and regal black
Women from whom loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden Sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his father loved
Spicy grove and banyan tree,
What is Africa to me?

A) “Heritage” by Countee Cullen
B) “Russian Cathedral” by Claude
McKay
C) “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston
D)

“Africa?” by Countee Cullen

Part II- Essay
Directions: Pick one of the following 4
options/slides. You will see that
each provides a brief citation from
one of the poems, stories, novels, or
essays we’ve read together. First,
identify the author of the passage
and the work from which the
passage comes (if it is not already
provided). Second, write a one to
one and a half page essay (double
spaced in times new roman font)
providing an in-depth analysis of the
passage just like we’ve been doing
in class. There are talking points to
get you started, but DO NOT try to
respond to all of them. Rather, pick
one (or none) to get you started.

Tips: In order to “rock” this portion of
the essay, you will need to do a few
things. 1) Provide an ORIGINAL
interpretation of the passage (NO
REGURGITATION). 2) This
interpretation should make a
concrete argument about how the
author deploys literary language to
convey complex meaning. In order
to accomplish this text, you must
back up your points with analyses
that draw evidence from textual
citation.

Snowstorm in Pittsburgh:
The Possibilities and Problematic
of a Black Internationalism, Race, Nation, Civilization
Sleep remained cold
and distant. Intermittently
the cooks broke their
snoring with masticating
noises of their fat lips, like
animals eating. Ray fixed
his eyes on the offensive
bug-bitten bulk of the
chef. These men claimed
kinship with him. Man
and nature had put them
in the race. He ought to
love them and feel them
(if he felt anything). Yet
he loathed every soul in
the great barrack-room,
except Jake. Race….
Why should he have to
love a race?
Races and nations
were things like skunks,
whose smells poisoned
the air of life. Yet civilized
mankind reposed its faith
and future in their ancient.
Silted channels.

He remembered when little
Hayti was floundering
1)
uncontrolled, how proud he
was to be the son of a free
nation. He used to feel
condescendingly sorry for
those poor African natives;
superior to ten millions of
suppressed Yankee “coons.”
Now he was just one of them
and he hated being just one of 2)
them….
But he was not entirely of
them, he reflected. He
possessed a language and
literature that they knew not 3)
of. And some day Uncle Sam
might let go of his island and
he would escape from the
clutches of that magnificent
4)
monster of civilization [….]
“We may be niggers
aw’right, but we ain’t nonetall
all the same,” Jake said as he
hurried along the dining car
thinking of Ray.

Talking Points
Race and nation were, at one time,
synonymous terms. What do you make of
Ray’s internal conflict here: he feels he “ought”
to love the men who claim “kinship” with him
and yet has a great distaste for feeling as
though he must “love”? Is this a simple back
and forth? Or is something more going on
here? What role does the fact that Ray is
delusional in this chapter play on our
interpretation of his machinations and
memories?
In Haiti, Ray drew distinctions between
members of the Diaspora and himself as a
proud Haitian nationalist. Now, displaced, he
finds himself both one and not one of them.
What do you make of the polemical and
metaphorical importance of this shift?
What is the magnificent monster of civilization?
The U.S.? If so, why does the narrator
differentiate it from Uncle Sam? How does the
final sentence of the first passage reposition
primitivism by displacing essentialism?
What is the metaphorical resonance of Jake’s
last sentence vis-à-vis the concept of
difference in unity?

•

•

•
•
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

• Talking Points
1) Heraclites, Time, and
Rivers: Is Hughes employing
the Classical trope? Or is
something else going on here
If so, what?
2) How and where do we
locate the poem’s persona?
For whom does this “I”
speak?
3) How does time work in this
poem?
4) How does the poem
position history vis-à-vis “the
soul” of the persona? 5) How
does this positioning reflect
Locke’s (not the poet here)
commitment to investigating
Africa as a vehicle for
awakening African American
self-consciousness?

•
•
•
•

•
•

• Talking Points
1) Sorrow Songs: Cultural Production as
Shared History
2) The question of Africa American
origins: Southern or African?
3) To whom does the song of the son
belong?
4) What themes are invoked by Toomer
‘s use of natural elements as symbols?
(soil, trees, seeds)
5) Why does Toomer’s persona speak of
a “partial soul” in song?
6) Continuity and Change: How is time
positioned in this poem?

QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

A Practical Prank
A Practical Prank

1)

“Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s
the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point
in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things
you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull
that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.”

2)

“Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?”
“Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by
educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.”

3)

“But education is something to make you fine!”
“No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A
Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our
education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead
stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”
“How’s that?”
“Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and
have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out
of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is
rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.”

“I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas
down to the levels of such filthy parasites.”
“All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be
civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would
be ashamed of—”
“You said it, the, most truly,” cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently
following the dialogue.

4)

5)

6)

7)

Talking Points
Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge
gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life.” He
seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but
he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage
resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution
suggest about the nature of this other education--one away
from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets?
What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes
between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined
community that educates themselves away from them? Who
is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are
being called into (and perhaps criticized) here?
Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes
you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling
socio-political terms. What are they? What political
discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage
invoke these discourses?
The political discourse that Ray does invoke is juxtaposed
against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke
primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What
is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is
redefine primitivism, or does it?
Play Ray!! Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the
disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about
how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.”? What ironic role
does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would
civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of
them?
What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to
which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas
and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed
them away? How does rotting play into all of this?
What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line
in this passage serve?