Like Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) was another leading light in the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1924, this is her first novel.

There Is Confusion is the story of three black youngsters growing up in the New York of the early 20th century. It constituted a response to a 1922 novel called Birthright. This was by T.S. Stribling, a white man whose black characters absolutely didn't ring true to Fauset. She resolved to write something that set the record straight.

Her three key characters are Joanna Marshall, a talented and ambitious young women, dead set on becoming a singer/dancer; Maggie Ellersley, an impoverished friend, whose slightly mercenary soft spot for Philip, the Marshalls' son, is punctured by Joanna's rather cruel intervention; and Peter Bye, who has a somewhat stormy relationship with Joanna.

Maggie does eventually end up with Philip, but not before an unwise marriage to a card sharp, a brief dalliance with Peter (miffed after being chided once too often by Joanna over his alleged lack of ambition), and the terrible experience of World War I, in which Philip is so badly injured that he doesn't live long to enjoy marital happiness. Through all these vicissitudes, though, Maggie has cured herself of her dependence on others' status and wealth, and learnt to be an independent businesswoman.

Joanna and Peter eventually end up with each other too, but not before a long and painful rift (occasioned by Joanna's discontent when Peter is about to give up his plan to be a doctor in favour of continuing in an easy -- and much more stereotypical -- job as an entertainer). Joanna plugs on with her calling in the interim, and breaks through blatant racial prejudice to become a noted singer/dancer. She eventually learns, though, that none of this is worth twopence without love in your life.



***

I liked the basic story a lot. Fauset projects very powerfully the plight of the black person in the United States of the day. Obstacle after obstacle after obstacle... Incredibly demoralizing. No wonder some people took to "passing", or decided to head overseas, where there'd be "no more insults..., no more lynching news".

Both Peter and Joanna struggle against the prejudice in their respective milieus. A friend says at one point: "Every colored man feels it sooner or later. It gets in the way of his dreams, of his education, of his marriage, of the rearing of his children. The time comes when he thinks, 'I might just as well fall back; there's no use pushing on. A colored man just can't make any headway in this awful country.' Of course, it's a fallacy. And if a fellow sticks it out he finally gets past it, but not before it has worked considerable confusion in his life. To have the ordinary job of living is bad enough, but to add to it all the thousand and one difficulties which follow simply in the train of being colored -- well..., we're some wonderful people to live through it all and keep our sanity."

Even when they're fighting for their country, black soldiers encounter racism from their white compatriots. They fought "a double battle in France, one with Germany and one with white America".


The remaining illustrations are from The New Negro, compiled by Alain Locke. This and the following two are by Aaron Douglas

Peter harbours a marked (and totally understandable) anger towards white people, on account of his ancestors' slave status. But the explanatory account of several generations of his lineage was a bit indigestible, and his war-time meeting with Meriweather (a scion of the slave-owners' family that was intimately connected with his own) was a bit of a stretch. It's one thing for Meriweather to be wracked by white guilt, which helps to correct Peter's blanket prejudice against all white people, but it's a bit more of a thing for him to actually harbour a death wish on that account.

I quite liked the little irony that's revealed at the end, though. It turns out Peter actually has a streak of white blood in him, and this he identifies as the little hobgoblin that often tried to stop him reaching his potential: "There is the source of all I used to be. My ingratitude, my inability to adopt responsibility, my very irresoluteness come from that strain of white Bye blood. But I understand it now, I can fight against it. I'm free." The white taint is a lovely little reversal of the stereotype.

Fauset also shows how this ethnic struggle is further complicated by class differences. For Joanna, Maggie is a "nobody". Not fit for her brother: "'What ambition has she?' Joanna asked herself fiercely, forgetting to measure the depth of the abyss of poverty and wretchedness from which Maggie had sprung. 'She shan't spoil my brother's chances.'" Ethnic solidarity only goes so far...



***

Where Fauset is more than a little inconsistent, however, is in her attitude to sexism. Early on, there's an exchange between Joanna and Peter that goes like this:

"'You know perfectly well that for a woman love usually means a household of children, the getting of a thousand meals, picking up laundry, no time to herself for meditation, or reading or --
"'Dancing! That's through poor management. Marry a man who understands you, Janna, and he'll see that you have time for anything you want. Where is such a man? Behold him!' He struck his chest dramatically."

But once their rupture has been healed, and they're back together again, it's a different story:

"'I'm afraid you'll have to give up your career, dear Joanna --'
"'Of course, of course, I know it.'
"'For, if there should be children, I want, oh, Joanna, I hope --'
"'You want them to be different from both you and me, Peter.'
"'Not so different from you. You were always so brave, so plucky. But, Joanna, if they are like me they’ll have so much to fight, and they’ll need you to help them.'"

Our heroine ends up tamed, way less feisty, way less interesting:

"Joanna, having come to understand the nothingness of that inordinate craving for sheer success, surprised herself by the pleasure which came to her out of what she had always considered the ordinary things of life. Realizing how nearly she had lost the essentials in grasping after the trimmings of existence, she experienced a deep, almost holy joy in the routine of the day... Her desire for greatness had been a sort of superimposed structure which, having been taken off, left her her true self."



We're sorry Fauset reached that conclusion. We definitely wince as we see Joanna pushing Peter past the bounds of all patience ("I don't want and won't have a husband who is just an ordinary strumming accompanist... Buck up, Peter, be a man. You've got to be one if you're going to marry me... I couldn't stand the thought of spending my life with some one ordinary"). But with her strongmindedness and her intolerance of mediocrity, she was far and away the novel's most interesting character, and we were cheering her on even as we tut-tutted.

So we're sorry when she swings from one extreme to the other, and wish there might have been some happy medium.

That rebound contact with Maggie has been bad for Peter, we feel. On the subject of Joanna, he complains: "'She's too exacting. Now there's one thing about you, Maggie -- maybe it's because you've already been married -- you know how to treat a man. Joanna makes you feel as though you were in a strait-jacket all the time. I always feel ordinary when I'm with you.' Neither of them noticed the doubtfulness of the compliment."


One of the book decorations, by Winold Reiss

***

Fauset attempted to cover rather too much ground, and some of the plot points are a bit creaky. Nevertheless, this is still very much a worthwhile read.

Nava Atlas points out that this was "the first novel to depict black middle-class people", and therefore came as a big surprise to some early commentators: "A review in the 31 May 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that the book's characters 'do not carry on a continuous burlesque... They are encouraged and thwarted in their endeavors precisely as the blondest Nordics are encouraged or thwarted. In short, they live in a perfectly natural fashion... The result is an unprejudiced study of modern negro psychology written with profound knowledge and understanding.'"

True, she received flak from some quarters for her emphasis on the bourgeois. "Yet the majority of Black critics were delighted with Fauset’s images of African-American life. Critic and anthropologist William Stanley Braithwaite praised her as 'the potential Jane Austen of Negro literature.'"

Where obstacles were concerned, Fauset certainly knew what she was talking about. A high-flying student who excelled everywhere she went, she nevertheless encountered plenty of the kind of racial prejudice she describes in her novel.

She eventually returned to her career in education, but not before completing four novels, and making her mark as an editor, poet, essayist, and one of the Harlem Renaissance's "literary midwives". As literary editor of The Crisis (1919-26), she promoted and published the early work of Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and more.


Portrait of Countee Cullen, also by Winold Reiss

Given those credentials, it's odd that she is comparatively little known these days. Morgan Jerkins argues that this is at least partly the result of sexism: "From the beginning the women of the Harlem Renaissance were slighted in celebrations of the movement..." While Zora Neale Hurston was championed by Alice Walker in the 1970s after her work went out of print, Fauset has scored no equivalent flagbearer. Yet, as Claire Oberon Garcia argues, "A look at Fauset’s entire body of work reveals a writer who is more engaged with modern questions of race, class, and gender than she has been given credit for."

Definitely worth another look.