Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/227

 American public which followed the band wagon and kept clamoring for additional performances, not because of any manifested excellence, but rather because of their sensationalism and pseudo-barbaric decor.

Emma Lou had heard much of his activity, and had been surprised to find herself in his household. Recently he had written a book concerning Negro life in Harlem, a book calculated by its author to be a sincere presentation of those aspects of life in Harlem which had interested him. Campbell Kitchen belonged to the sophisticated school of modern American writers. His novels were more or less fantastic bits of realism, skipping lightly over surfaces of life, and managing somehow to mirror depths through superﬁcialities. His novel on Harlem had been a literary failure because the author presumed that its subject matter demanded serious treatment. Hence, he disregarded the traditions he had set up for himself in his other works, and produced an energetic and entertaining hodgepodge, where the bizarre was strangled by the sentimental, and the erotic clashed with the commonplace.

Negroes had not liked Campbell Kitchen’s delineation of their life in the world’s greatest colored city. They contended that, like ‘“Nigger Heaven” by Carl Van Vechten, the book gave white people a wrong