[In the following essay, Fleming writes about the work of Waters E. Turpin, Alden Bland, and Frank London Brown, three black novelists who, according to Fleming have written significant works about Chicago.]

Inevitably, when one thinks of the black writer's depiction of American city life, he is likely to think first of Richard Wright's Chicago—the cold, snowy city through which Bigger Thomas flees in Native Son, the city from which Cross Damon escapes in The Outsider, the frustrating home of Jake Jackson in Wright's posthumous novel Lawd Today. However, the prominence of Wright has caused several other significant realistic treatments of black Chicago to be overlooked. Three novelists whose work has been largely ignored, even by specialists in black literature, are Waters E. Turpin, Alden Bland, and Frank London Brown.¹

Waters E. Turpin enjoys the distinction of having published the first novel about the black population of Chicago; in 1939, twenty years after the great migration (and more than 150 years after Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, a black man, built the first house on the future site of the city), Turpin published O Canaan! The novel is the story of Joe Benson, a Mississippi black who moves his family to Chicago during the labor shortage of World War I, works his way to respectability, loses his money in the 1929 crash, and ends up working as a Pullman porter, tired but undefeated. In spite of the fact that Turpin was honest in presenting the very bad conditions that prevailed in the Black Belt, his novel is less propagandistic and militant than Native Son. If the book were widely distributed today, it would undoubtedly be denounced as accommodationist because Negroes are presented first as people and only secondarily as members of the black race. No one reading the book could fail to realize that conditions were bad indeed within the ghetto, yet blame is divided between the white exploiters who charge high rentals for their slum property and the blacks themselves, who are sometimes presented as irresponsible. In spite of its somewhat dated tone, however, the book provides valuable insight into the great migration and early life in the Chicago black community.

Turpin supplies motivation for his characters' migration by devoting the first twenty pages of O Canaan! to conditions in the South before the migration. A massive crop failure has occurred in Mississippi because of the boll weevil, and most of the tenant farmers have been ruined. Joe is better off than most, since he owns a store as well as a fifteen-acre plot of ground left to him by his father, who was an overseer for a wealthy white family. However, Joe knows that even he will have trouble surviving through the following year. Plagued by economic conditions, the blacks have also been reminded of their precarious position in the community by a public lynching just two weeks before. At such an opportune time, a labor agent from the North comes through the area, spreading the word that there are good jobs and freedom in Chicago. Special trains depart from Jackson every few days. Joe and his family join the migration, looking forward to a better education for the children, the right to vote and own a home, and the absence of prejudice which the agent has told them they will find in Chicago.

Although Chicago is not the promised land as they have been led to believe, the Benson family does not see the city as entirely bad. Their experiences in the city reflect Turpin's view of Chicago, which was quite similar to Carl Sandburg's:

Lusty, virile, and boisterous city …, city of the high, the low, the merchant prince and the consuming pauper …, of the polyglot racial spawns spewed from all the quarters of the globe. … Great pioneer city, sprung from the hut of Du Sable: nor Northern rigors of climate, nor disaster of fire could defeat you! You bared your brawn to the elements and roared defiance! From ashes you reared yourself to splendor! … You stretched forth your arms in welcome and embraced, with a huge belly laughter, the polyglot racial spawns spewed from all the globe's quarters. … Great Canaan, ugliest where you are ugly, … altogether beautiful among ten thousand, where you are beautiful, … O Canaan … Titan of the prairies!²

With money gained from the sale of his Mississippi land and store, Joe buys a small grocery store in Chicago. He goes to night school and gets his eighth-grade diploma; the children attend an integrated school which is superior to their school in Mississippi. Because of Joe's thrift, the Bensons are able to buy a house on the fringe of the Black Belt, where most of their neighbors are white. Although they are snubbed, they are allowed to live there without being physically attacked.

However, at the same time a more typical side of black life in Chicago is shown. Most of the newcomers have not had the advantage of capital to invest, and they are trapped in the slums, harnessed to jobs which pay only enough to allow the workers to continue living. Because conditions are so miserable, many try to forget their troubles by drinking, gambling, and sexual promiscuity. The results of this way of life are observed by Joe's daughter, Essie, who accompanies a public health nurse into one of the lower-class tenements in the black district: “An emaciated brown girl lay amid a wad of bedclothes that fairly crawled with vermin. Her hair was a mass against the almost black pillowcase. Beside her squirmed a naked infant whose arms and legs were festerous with running sores. It was sucking at a bottle containing a thin, yellowish liquid” (p. 163). The nurse tells Essie the young mother's background when they leave the apartment. When the girl's father deserted his family, her mother became an alcoholic. With no supervision, the girl ran wild and soon mothered an illegitimate baby, whose father left town. The girl and her baby are presently dependent on public charity. Instead of attempting to help, the more prosperous blacks who have lived in Chicago for a long time draw back from the sordid lives of the late arrivals, fearing—and rightly so—that the irresponsible habits and bad manners of the southern blacks will reflect on the whole race.

Whites whose jobs are threatened by the black labor force or whose homes are threatened by the expansion of the Black Belt are more actively hostile. In the summer of 1919, racial relations become explosive when a riot erupts on the beach. For the next few days, Negroes are safe only within their homes inside the Black Belt, and even some houses inside the line are bombed. Sol Benson, Joe's oldest son, has been a soldier in an all-black outfit. During the riot he joins a number of Negro veterans who arm themselves to defend the Black Belt and carry out reprisals against the whites. The riot touches the family more seriously than most racial difficulties when Sol comes home mortally wounded. Before the National Guard is called up to put a stop to hostilities, the Bensons hear terrible stories of streetcars being stopped on their way through white neighborhoods and blacks on their way to work being pulled off and murdered.

In spite of the troubles that the Bensons endure, the book ends on a hopeful note, with Joe's two surviving children happily married and Joe himself content although he has lost his money; many have not been so fortunate. Joe's son-in-law, Bran, sums up the situation in Chicago:

“To my mind Chicago, taken in all its aspects, offers about as fair an opportunity to all its people for advancement as any city I've lived in. The average visitor from the East goes back home with tales of splendor. And he's right as far as he goes. You'll find more businesses run by Negroes here than in any other Northern city; you'll find finer homes also. But, like any other city, ours has its seamy side. It offers you both. It says to the newcomer: ‘Here are my wares—take what you're strong enough to take and hold. No city can offer more!’ And she's right. If you're weak, then you get the weakling's portion, and the other way around.”

(p. 292)

While such a situation is hardly admirable, Turpin emphasizes the ability of the middle-class black to survive; his view of Chicago as a place where the black can rise if he is strong enough is far more optimistic than Richard Wright's.

Less accommodationist than Turpin's O Canaan! but not so angry as Wright's Chicago novels is Alden Bland's Behold a Cry (1947), an historical novel which tells the story of Eddie Tyler, a southern Negro who brings his family to Chicago during the 1918 labor shortage. Like Turpin, Bland is less concerned with propaganda than is Wright.³ He presents not only the black's difficulties, but also his uninhibited love of life, his occasional rowdiness, and the amoral way of life followed by some members of the race.

Eddie has preceded his family to Chicago, saying that he will send for them when he has enough money to support them, but before they arrive, he acquires a mistress, Mamie. When his wife, Phom, and his two boys arrive, Eddie attempts to keep both women in the same apartment, but Phom forces him to move out with her and the boys. At the end of the novel, Eddie deserts his family for still another woman, and Phom is left to support the children. The irresponsibility of the black man—a theme which often appears in black fiction—is an important part of this novel. The mother is frequently left alone with the children as Phom is in Behold a Cry. Boys growing up without any example of male responsibility become men who are also prone to desert their spouses; thus the social evil is perpetuated. On the other hand, because the mother becomes a symbol of strength, black culture tends to be matriarchal.

When Eddie's family first arrives in Chicago, living conditions seem good. Eddie points out that there is no Jim Crow law; the black can sit where he wants on buses and in theaters. The apartment in which they live is small and crowded, but it is not nearly as squalid as the Thomas apartment in Native Son. A neighborhood boy named Walter takes charge of the two Tyler boys and shows them a nearby library which can be used by blacks as well as whites, and he leads them out of the Black Belt into a nearby white neighborhood, where they are able to look around freely without being molested. When the family moves out of Mamie's apartment, however, they go deeper into the ghetto to a remodeled stable. Here they find that middle-class blacks live in the houses on the street, while recent migrants of the lower class live in quarters like their own in the alleys. The middle-class blacks maintain a strict segregation policy, and their children chase the alley children back to their home ground when the latter try to join in play.

At about the time when the Tylers discover the bleak housing situation in the ghetto, violence breaks out throughout the city. Eddie, in a rare display of paternal affection, has taken the boys to the beach, where they witness the beginning of the 1919 race riot, the worst in Chicago's history. Several young blacks decide to cross over into the white section of the beach, a stonethrowing fight begins, and a black boy is killed. When the police refuse to arrest anyone for the crime, the incident erupts into a general riot. In spite of white threats to do violence to any blacks caught outside the Black Belt, Eddie stubbornly insists on going to work the next day, and is almost killed when whites pull the trolley pole off the wire, stop the car, and attempt to beat him to death. He is rescued, oddly enough, by white police officers, who are usually villains in black fiction. Another example of racial violence occurs later, during a meatpackers' strike. Since blacks are not allowed to join white unions, they form their own; but most don't bother to join since the Negro union is considered virtually powerless. Consequently, when the unions call a strike, most blacks continue to work. Eddie, who is among the strikebreakers, watches from the roof of the plant one lunch-hour as pickets catch a Negro scab, throw him into Bubbly Creek, part of the South Branch of the Chicago River, and stone him until he sinks.

Through Eddie and Phom, Bland presents two approaches to the problem of the Negro. Eddie curses his fate of having been born black and forces his sons to look at his beaten body after he is caught by the rioters. He warns his oldest boy that blacks must stick together against the whites: “We all niggers together! That's something special. …”⁴ Yet Eddie refuses to join the Negro union at the urging of his old friend, Sam Brown; what he means by sticking together is maintaining an unremitting hate for the whites and striking out at them violently when a chance arises. However, Eddie—unlike Bigger Thomas—strikes back only by cursing the whites when he is in an all-black group. Phom, on the other hand, teaches the boys that even though the whites may hate them, it is wrong to hate back. Unlike Eddie, she is not ashamed of being black and tells the boys that they should not be ashamed either; instead they should gain respect from others by having self-respect. Bland seems to imply that Eddie's philosophy is destructive and ineffectual, while Phom's philosophy might have some good influence.

Frank London Brown's Trumbull Park (1959) is the first black Chicago novel to treat a new development in the city—the attempt of the middle-class black to break out of the ghetto and establish a foothold in outlying areas. Buggy Martin and his family are subjected to mass protests, stone throwing, and bombs when they move into a government-subsidized housing project, but they stay in spite of the fact that police cars have to take them in and out of the neighborhood to protect them from their white neighbors.

In the first chapter a little neighbor girl falls to her death from the fourth floor porch outside the Martins' back door; the shocking incident forces the Martins to consider leaving their South State Street apartment. They recall past fires in the old building and the landlord's refusal to supply adequate heat and to make badly needed repairs. The building is nearly as dilapidated as the one which the Thomases inhabit in Native Son; it reeks with the smell of overcrowded humanity, and rats make holes in the walls as fast as the tenants can cover them. In spite of the fact that trouble has been reported in the South Side development, Trumbull Park, where one black family is already living, Buggy and Helen decide to take their chances there.

The campaign of terror that is carried out by the whites of the neighborhood begins with heckling. As the Martins move into their new apartment, they are met with cries of “Get out, Africans—GET OUT!” and “Go back to Africa, nigger!”⁵ In spite of police protection, stones are thrown at the moving truck. However, the real campaign begins only when the neighborhood men return from work. At supper time, a crowd gathers and throws bricks through most of the windows; shortly afterward, noise bombs start exploding. Earlier in the day Buggy and Helen have heard the police talking about a plot to dynamite their apartment, and the bombs increase their nervousness.

Police reaction to the violence is mild. The police captain in charge of the detachment sent to maintain order repeatedly warns his men that the citizens—meaning the whites—have their rights. When one of his men clubs a man who has tried to fight his way to the blacks' door, the captain reprimands him sharply; Buggy later contrasts this careful safeguarding of citizens' right with incidents he has seen inside the Black Belt: “I also remember the time a policeman hit a colored boy in the stomach—where he'd been cut in a gang fight, because the boy wouldn't tell who the other boys in the gang were. I remember how the blood squirted out underneath the boy's sports shirt and ran down the front of his pants” (p. 382).

On the other hand, the blacks are ruled with an iron hand. When Buggy's friend, Red, who is helping them to move in, tries to respond to the insults and stone-throwing, a patrolman seizes him and shouts, “Get back into that truck! What are you trying to do—start a riot?” (p. 27) Later, when Buggy and three other black tenants get angry and decide to go for a walk, the police immediately catch and search them, arresting two men for carrying weapons, although the white rioters carry bricks and bombs with impunity.

It is to be expected that a common topic of black jokes is the Chicago Police Department. Especially scorned are the black police, who seem like traitors to their race because the law is dominated by white power. Buggy even shuns his brother Ricky for joining the force. Yet when Buggy talks to one of the black officers assigned to Trumbull Park, he sees that the man is doing his best in a difficult situation:

“This is hell! And that ain't no lie,” [the Negro policeman said.] He looked behind him, and seeing nobody near, walked a few steps away from the station and said, “They don't give us no kind of break.”

I knew this cat was talking about us colored folks, but he was a cop, so I said:

“You mean, you cops?”

He laughed:

“Daddy, I mean us colored folks.”

“Man, you sure said it! What they need to do is to whip a few heads out here the way they do down on 58th street. This stuff would break up in no time.”

“Listen, you'd better not let one of the colored cops out here start anything like that! … The least they'd do would be to send him back to the station.”

I was surprised at the bitter way this policeman talked about the police force. To me all policemen had seemed to be just one big family of bullies, no matter what their color was. More than once I'd seen some colored policeman teaming up with his white partner to beat the devil out of a Negro. But now there seemed to be a difference. This Negro policeman showed that he didn't go for what was happening no kind of way.

(pp. 138-139)

Although Brown is not as angry as Wright, he shows how the strain of remaining non-violent while the whites continue to attack day after day begins to affect Buggy. After he is chased home by a brick-throwing crowd, he asks his wife, “What kind of man am I? … What kind of roach did you marry?” (p. 142) When she tries to comfort him by reminding him of times when he showed bravery, he replies, “Colored, colored, colored! Everybody that I ever stood up to was colored!” (pp. 143-144) Yet when Buggy does respond, it is in a non-violent manner, by simply walking through the whites, who then realize what they could not know when the police were holding them in check—that they cannot kill a man who walks up and faces them, wanting only to walk to his home.

Brown's picture of Negro life is more thorough than Wright's because it emphasizes the humanity of black people by presenting their daily lives. While Native Son is a sort of horror story, Trumbull Park is a story of real people, different in their speech patterns and cultural habits from the whites of Chicago and yet clearly not as different from them as the whites suppose. The book has one great strength in its skillful employment of the black idiom, both in narration and dialogue; its other strong point is that all of the families brought into the story are both respectable and thoroughly black. None attempt to mimic white culture as a way to respectability, but all give the impression of being intelligent, hardworking, and stable. Finally, while Native Son ends on a note of despair, Trumbull Park ends hopefully, by suggesting that the Negro can find a way out of his problems. Brown, of course, has the advantage of writing about a very different situation than the one Wright depicted, since Chicago's racial circumstances had changed considerably in the nineteen years separating the two novels.

Do these three novels merit rediscovery by students of black American literature? Admittedly, none is a lost classic of black fiction, yet each provides insights into facets of black life that are not thoroughly examined in the better-known works by black authors. O Canaan! is unusual in that it deals with the black middle class shopkeeper and the special problems that he faces. Behold a Cry offers, among other things, an examination of the black man's relationship with unions. Both novels present a black view of the major race riot that erupted in the summer of 1919. Trumbull Park suggests that all of the problems of black people in America's cities do not belong to history; the problems that the Martins face are more directly related to the lives of black people today than are those of Bigger Thomas. All three novels complement Wright's view of the black man in urban America and are valuable and socially significant documents.

Notes

1. Robert Bone's The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) makes no mention of O Canaan! beyond a listing in the bibliography; Bland's novel is treated in a single sentence, which concedes its “psychological subtlety” (p. 159); Brown is not listed since his novel falls outside the historical scope of the book. Hugh M. Gloster's Negro Voices in American Fiction (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965) offers a brief discussion of O Canaan!, pp. 246-248, but does not mention Bland's or Brown's novels.

2. Waters E. Turpin, O Canaan! (New York: Doubleday, 1939), p. 20. Subsequent citations will appear in parentheses in the text.

3. Robert Bone sees Bland as one of several transitional authors who emphasized the general problems of the slum as well as those of interracial conflict; however, as Bone notes, “the emphasis is still racial” (p. 159). To state that the novel offers no social thesis as Carl Milton Hughes asserts in The Negro Novelist (New York: Citadel, 1953), p. 116, is to misread it drastically.

4. Alden Bland, Behold a Cry (New York: Scribner's, 1947), p. 164.

5. Frank London Brown, Trumbull Park (Chicago: Regnery, 1959), pp. 28-29. Subsequent citations will appear in parentheses in the text.