Arna Bontemps "Why I Returned (A Personal Essay)"

Arna Bontemps left Louisiana for California around the age of three. He talks about this movement in "Why I Returned (A Personal Essay)" which opens his 1973 collection of short stories The Old South. In many way, Bontemps reasons for returning can be seen in a similar manner to those of Gaines. While Bontemps came from a middle-class family and Gaines from a family of sharecroppers, both started their lives in Louisiana, moved away, then eventually either returned to their home state or to the Deep South. Bontemps, after going to New York, returned to the South teaching in Alabama (during the Scottsboro Boys trial) from 1931-1934. For the next two posts, I want to speak briefly about what Bontemps' essay says about African American literature and the "arts" and how it relates to not just Gaines' life but to the lives of many others as well.

Originally published in 1965, Bontemps' essay focuses on a major debate regarding African American literature that raged during the Harlem Renaissance regarding whether or not "art" should maintain its link to "folk heritage" or whether it should link itself to more Eurocentric forms of artistic expression. From the outset, it is clear which position Bontemps sided with. He applauds and quotes from Langston Hughes' "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain":

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned 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. (958)

Bontemps' struggle to determine whether or not he should break with the "folk heritage" manifests itself in his father's and great-uncle's (Buddy) differing views on what to do with the South once they start their lives in California. Bontemps recalls dinner conversations where Buddy and his father brought up the South. When reminiscing about Louisiana, Bontemps' father would say, "Sometimes I miss all that. If I was just thinking about myself, I might want to go back and try it again. But I've got the children to think about--their education" (8). For Buddy, he would simply reply by saying, "Folks talk a lot about California . . . but I'd a heap rather be down home than here, if it wasn't for the conditions" (8-9). In some ways, both men miss their home in Louisiana, but due to differing circumstances both do not wish to return.

Bontemps' father had to think about his children. He continually approved of Buddy's ability to read and write well, but he disparaged Buddy for his "casual and frequent use of the word nigger;" for his love of "dialect stories, preacher stories, ghost stories, slave and master stories;" and for his belief "in signs and charms and mumbo jumbo" (9). Not wanting his son to look at Buddy for an example and to better his education, Bontemps' father sent him to a white boarding school for high school. He told his son, "Now don't go up there acting colored" (10). The tension between hanging on to the "folk heritage" of Louisiana and the South manifests itself in Bontemps' father and great-uncle. As Bontemps says, "In their opposing attitudes towards roots my father and my great-uncle made me aware of a conflict in which every educated American Negro, and some who are not educated, must somehow take sides" (11).

Portrait by Weinold Reiss

Bontemps concludes his essay by providing examples of African Americans staying or leaving the South, and he states, "The southern Negro's link with the past seems to me worth preserving" (23). In support of this statement, Bontemps talks about those who have migrated away from the South and now talk about "Soulville," "Soulbrothers," and "Soulfood." The South and its "folk heritage" serve as a source of inspiration and as means of connection with the past. Bontemps taps this in the in the stories collected in The Old South, and like Gaines, even though he may have, at times, tried to distance himself from the region, he kept returning, both physically and mentally. In the next post, I will delve more into Bontemps' relation to Gaines. I did not do this here, but this post will serve as a background to expand the discussion next time.



Bontemps, Arna. The Old South: "A Summer Tragedy" and Other Stories of the Thirties. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973. Print.
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature. Eds. Rochelle Smith and Sharon L. Jones. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2000. 955-958. Print.

Chesnutt's "Paul Marchand F.M.C."

Teaching Charles Chesnutt's Paul Marchand F.M.C. during my "City and American Literature: New Orleans, Chicago, and New York" class last year, I became struck by two descriptions of houses that Chesnutt portrays: Pierre Beaurepas' and Paul Marchand's. The descriptions are fleeting, but a closer look at both of them reveals something about each character and what he values. Matthew Wilson, in the introduction to the novel, claims "the novel is in some way about the consequences of education" (xviii-xix). Today,  I want to explore how the descriptions of Pierre's and Paul's houses add to this conversation. I don't plan to add a summary of the novel, but if you have not read it, the link above provides a summary and the NY Times book review can be seen here.

Upon first describing Pierre's house, the narrator intones that the house is "the temple of the Beaurepas cult," constructing an image of the house as a type of shrine to the Beaurepas family name (23). With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that after Adolphe (one of Pierre's nephews) moves from the extravagance of the exterior architecture into the interior of the house that the house continues to resemble a temple with a fresco of Boucher's The Judgement of Paris, a Velasquez, and "a painting of Vigée Lebrun." Along with these paintings, Pierre's house also contains works by Benvenuto Cellini and  other bronzes. Within the library, Adolphe encounters "glazed bookcases, filled with leather-backed books, many of them bound in hand-tooled morocco" and a reduced, bronze copy of "Houdon's seated statue of Voltaire" (25). Passing through the room, Adolphe takes stock of the books. The narrator says,

Adolphe knew the books by their titles, but had small familiarity with their contents; he had never been fond of reading. Many of them he was aware were rare and curious, and should they become his, they could readily be turned into money which would buy pleasures he would appreciate far more than those of intellect. (emphasis added 25) 

Adolphe's thoughts, and the manner in which Pierre adorns his house, says a lot about them and the way they think about the world. Adolphe seeks, as the narrator makes clear, pleasures, refusing a modicum of enlightenment and education that can come through the books that his uncle has lining the walls of his library.

Houdon's Voltaire

When it comes to Pierre, he is "the disciple of Rousseau and Voltaire, cynical in his attitude towards life" (26). He sits in his chair holding a newly-arrived copy of "Émile, autographed and annotated by the great Jean Jacques himself" (26). Rousseau's treatise argues that education should return to nature instead of systematized education which would make man unnatural an education where the student learns from the consequences of his his actions "would result in a balance between desire and ability" (Wilson xviii). Wilson notes this scene as an indication that the novel is in some way about education, and I agree. However, I want to focus on the fact that the items in Pierre's house serve no purpose apart from adornment. The Rousseau book, even though it Pierre holds it, becomes "a rare item for his collection" (26). We do not see Pierre reading it, and we only see Adolphe thinking about how much money the collection can make him after his uncle passes.

Contrary to Pierre's "temple" filled with rare books, paintings, metal work, and other items, Paul's house is modest. However, the modesty does not make it any less important. The narrator spends about three-four pages on describing Pierre's abode and only about a paragraph on Paul's. Within that paragraph, though, we see that Paul's house is full of items that make him a "man of culture." Even though society classifies him as a Free Man of Color, and thus does not allow him the same rights as a white citizen, his house shows him to be more aware of the intellectual world around him when compared with Adolphe. The house on Bourbon Street contains books lining the walls, which appear to have been read, and art around the room. A piano and a harp sit in the room with sheet music open on the piano. Finally, the table contains "some current French novels and magazines" (88). The Marchand house contains culture just like the Beaurepas mansion, but the difference is that the Marchands appear to interact with the culture they bring into their house while the Beaurepas do not.

What does all of this say? I know there is more here, but at this time I am unsure what to think. For instance, specific artists and authors appear in the description of the Beaurepas' house, but none of that shows up in the description of the Marchand's. What does that say? What does it say that Paul "accepted and proclaimed the radical doctrine of The Rights of Man as applying to all men" (84). These are some of the questions I have.       

Chesnutt, Charles W. Paul Marchand F.M.C. Ed. Matthew Wilson. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998.