Now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the exhibition One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North is a rare opportunity to see a landmark of twentieth-century American art in its entire, original form. Conceived in 1939 and completed two years later, Lawrence’s Migration Series consists of sixty numbered tempera paintings, each measuring 18 x 12 inches, in which the young Harlem-based artist documented the huge population shift that brought hundreds of thousands of his fellow African Americans from the rural American South to the urban, industrialized North over the preceding quarter-century.
Because the sixty paintings have been divided between MoMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington for decades, any exhibition that presents them all in sequence is self-recommending. (MoMA’s website also reproduces all sixty panels, with extensive commentary.) But the new show boasts an additional feature that should particularly appeal to Library of America readers—a well-organized side room devoted to literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Aficionados of book design will especially appreciate the display case featuring original hardcover editions, including seven titles reprinted in The Library of America series: Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright; Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson; Cane by Jean Toomer; Home to Harlem by Claude McKay; and Quicksand by Nella Larsen.
The latter three works are included in the two-volume Library of America collection Harlem Renaissance Novels, which incorporates in its jacket and slipcase design several striking illustrations by Aaron Douglas, a major influence on Lawrence as a young artist. The MoMA exhibit showcases two of those illustrations in their original context—on the dust jackets for Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (third edition, Knopf, 1927) and McKay’s Home to Harlem (Harper & Brothers, 1928).
Above: Three books with jackets designed by Aaron Douglas. Elements from
the illustration for Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Home to Harlem
were incorporated in the jacket and slipcase design (below)
for the LOA boxed set Harlem Renaissance Novels.
Taken together, the books on display at MoMA form a literary analogue to the epic story Lawrence chronicled in his Migration Series. A quotation from Wright’s Black Boy (1945) in the accompanying wall text underscores the finality of that “one way” in the exhibition title. Describing his departure from Mississippi on a Chicago-bound train, Wright recalls:
I was leaving without a qualm, without a single backward glance. . . . My mood was: I’ve got to get away; I can’t stay here.
MoMA’s exhibition website offers additional information about Douglas, “the leading Harlem Renaissance artist” who also collaborated with the poet Countee Cullen on the groundbreaking 1927 anthology Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets.
One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through September 7, 2015. Visit moma.org for complete exhibition information.
Bobby Kennedy recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years if I'm lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy's mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country's mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn't want to be.... [W]hat really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro 'first' will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he will be president of?
What would Baldwin make of Obama’s America? This passage is vintage Baldwin, turning a question around to gain a new and provocative perspective. He did much the same trick in his famous riposte to a British television interviewer: “When you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, homosexual, you must have said to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged could I get?’” “No,” Baldwin snapped back, “I thought I hit the jackpot. It was so outrageous you could not go any further. I had to find out a way to use it.” (see 0:32 of YouTube video)
In his review of the new collection in The Los Angeles Times Lynell George expands on how momentous Baldwin's attitude was for American culture:
We hit the jackpot—all of us—anyone interested in engaging in candid albeit stakes-changing debate, anyone who had an investment in equity, humanity and its future. We gained tremendously from the variegated prism through which he viewed and translated the world.
From the late 1940s until his death in 1987, Baldwin walked into the very center of the maelstrom—whether it was the rhetorical theater of debate or the very front line of violence of the Jim Crow South—but he wasn't simply everywhere at once: He was deeply invested in each and every outcome.
As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals. He probably has, in fact, no real competitors. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto.
Dupee then quotes a passage from The Fire Next Time:
Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.
About this passage Dupee remarks: “Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one’s dreams.”
In “Universal Blues,” her review of the new collection for Columbia Journalism Review, Kimberly Chou tries to locate the source of Baldwin’s incantatory prose:
A preacher’s son, Baldwin grew up in Harlem as a teenage evangelist, entering the pulpit at fourteen and abandoning it three years later. In his nonfiction above all, one can see that the skill for oratory stayed with him—transferred to the page for a wider audience. His language could sometimes be baroque. Yet his message always cut straight through, even when his opinions were hard to swallow. The reader feels compelled to keep reading, no matter how raw or unapologetic the subject material.
Lynell George takes the measure of the breadth of Baldwin's achievement:
... what this volume underscores is Baldwin's immense cross-disciplinary range—as a reader, thinker, lecturer and pundit. Though race was a theme that was never out of arm's reach, his preoccupation with societal ethics and humanity was tantamount. And though, as Kenan points out in his evocative introduction, Baldwin first and foremost considered himself a novelist, it was the essays—particularly "The Fire Next Time" and "Notes of a Native Son" that cemented his fate, which [Kenan points out in the introduction] "transformed Baldwin into something more than a writer for the American public and world at large—if the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was the civil rights movement's Moses, James Baldwin had become its Jeremiah, despite his protestations of speaking for no one but himself."
Like many other writers, Baldwin felt the need to declare his independence from his literary forebears. The new book includes his savage review of Richard Wright’s Native Son, comparing it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Wright had introduced Baldwin to the New York literati and their relationship never recovered.
In an interview with NPR, editor Kenan describes what he believes to be one of the reasons for Baldwin’s enduring appeal: “He lifts the veil,” Kenan says. “White people felt that they had an insight into black America that they didn't have before.”
