Toni Morrison’s “Jazz” (1992) is a book born of books. In a 2004 foreword, Morrison traces the novel’s premise to an image of a young woman she saw in the photographer James Van Der Zee’s “The Harlem Book of the Dead” (1978), a volume of funerary photographs he began compiling in the 1920s. Novels, especially historical novels, often owe debts like this — to a photo or a scrap of prose, a song or a film. In the case of “Jazz,” however, Morrison’s debt is not to that image alone but to the sustained period of Black intellectual and cultural production we’ve come to call a renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance, generally understood to have spanned the 1920s and the ’30s, is often evoked in the shorthand of famous names — most especially, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Hughes’s jazz- and blues-themed poetry embodies the devotion to the music that would lend its name to the age. Hurston’s folkloric imagination encompasses the rhythms and the stories, the humor and the wisdom of the Black oral tradition. In “Jazz,” both of these literary ancestors are alive: In the novel’s Hughesian sonic atmosphere and in its Hurstonian intimacy, the amity and enmity, among Morrison’s characters.
But “Jazz” is also in conversation with other, perhaps less apparent or less remembered sources. During the three years Morrison researched and wrote the novel, she amassed an extensive bibliography. “To reproduce the flavor of the period,” she writes, “I had read issues of every ‘Colored’ newspaper I could for the year 1926. The articles, the advertisements, the columns, the employment ads. I had read Sunday school programs, graduation ceremony programs, minutes of women’s club meetings, journals of poetry, essays. I listened to the scratchy ‘race’ records with labels like Okeh, Black Swan, Chess, Savoy, King, Peacock.” Morrison’s characters are readers and listeners, too — of newspapers and magazines, poetry and blues sides. And they invite us to follow their lead.
“Jazz,” a novel filtered through the consciousness of everyday people who inhabit the same Harlem neighborhoods as Hurston and Hughes, allows for a backward glance toward a complex cultural moment, one in which novelists and poets, songwriters and essayists were coming to terms with many of the same concerns that Morrison would address some 70 years later: How to represent the richness of Black American speech on the page; how not just to namecheck jazz and blues but to exercise them as literary modes; how to liberate Black characters from racist stereotypes as well as from the straitjacket of respectability politics. And just as the following works might also have informed Morrison, the light emanating from “Jazz” illuminates them as well.
“God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse” (1927) by James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was among the most accomplished Americans of his era. He was an attorney (the first Black American admitted to the Florida Bar), an activist (field secretary to the nascent N.A.A.C.P.), a diplomat (Theodore Roosevelt appointed him U.S. consul to Venezuela), a songwriter (with his brother, J. Rosamond, he wrote Broadway hits as well as “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” now considered the Black national anthem) and a novelist (he wrote 1912’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” whose influence is apparent in, among other works, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” published in 1952).
Johnson was also a poet. His second collection, “God’s Trombones,” subtitled “Seven Negro Sermons in Verse,” is an experiment in voice: an attempt to capture sermons from the Black church without making recourse to misspellings and orthographic tricks often employed to represent Black vernacular speech. He shared this approach with Morrison, who never rent words, relying instead on studied attention to the ways that her characters might actually speak. “The language of average, of poor African Americans is always discredited,” she told Charlie Rose in 1993. “But there was this incredible merging of new language and biblical language and sermonic language, street language and standard that created a third thing for me … a third kind of way of expressing yourself.”
Johnson understood that third way. Where racists heard simplicity and ignorance in Black folk idioms, he heard sophistication and elegance. “The old-time Negro preacher loved the sonorous, mouth-filling, ear-filling phrase because it gratified a highly developed sense of sound and rhythm in himself and his hearers,” Johnson writes in the preface to the collection. Through repetition, sharp line breaks, interpolations of syntax and more, Johnson conjures these artful sounds for our listening pleasure, as well.
“Hot Chocolates” (1929) by Thomas “Fats” Waller, Harry Brooks (music), Andy Razaf (book) and Leonard Harper (choreographer-producer)
In the late 1920s, the mob boss Dutch Schultz decided to diversify his activities beyond bootlegging and racketeering to include financing a Broadway show. That show was “Hot Chocolates,” an all-Black musical revue composed by the jazz pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller and the lyricist Andy Razaf, one of the few Black songwriters working on Tin Pan Alley. “Hot Chocolates” enjoyed a seven-month run of over 200 performances at Broadway’s Hudson Theater.
Few today are familiar with the show, but many will recognize its best-known tune, “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” which is also the name of the 1978 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical revue celebrating Waller’s work. That production also includes perhaps the most remarkable number in “Hot Chocolates”: “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue.” Legend has it that Schultz asked Razaf to write lyrics for the song from the perspective of a dark-skinned Black woman scorned by her lover in favor of a lighter-skinned mate. When Razaf politely declined, Schultz convinced him otherwise — at gunpoint. Originally performed by Edith Wilson, “Black and Blue” is indeed a song about intraracial heartbreak (“Browns and yellers all have fellers / Gentlemen prefer them light”). Like the love triangle at the center of “Jazz,” it tells a story of love and trouble.
“Black and Blue” enjoyed a second life when Louis Armstrong, a young trumpeter playing in the “Hot Chocolates” orchestra pit, recorded a version of his own. Armstrong reimagined the song as a sardonic lament of Black life under Jim Crow segregation, altering Razaf’s words when necessary and endowing others (“my only sin is in my skin”) with a radical new meaning that would inspire Ellison’s unnamed protagonist from “Invisible Man,” who listens to Armstrong’s recording underground.
“Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) by Zora Neale Hurston
Among Zora Neale Hurston’s oeuvre, her 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” is the most obvious antecedent to “Jazz.” Both works use the vicissitudes of heterosexual romantic love as occasion to delve into female friendship and alienation. More elementally, though, both Morrison and Hurston were students of Black expressive culture. Trained at Barnard College under the direction of Franz Boas, the father of American cultural anthropology, Hurston undertook field work in both the American South and the Caribbean. She came away with strong opinions — sometimes overstated ones — about the patterns of Black art, speech and storytelling.
In Hurston’s essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” she offers insights that are at times essentializing, at other times radically clarifying. She identifies among the dominant characteristics what she calls the “will to adorn”: the impulse to take what is given or enforced — as with, for instance, the English language — and decorate it with unexpected flourishes. Reading “Jazz,” it’s possible to reverse-engineer a “Characteristics” that Morrison might write, which would include the centrality of play, the urge to enumerate, the value of sanity-saving comedy in the face of cruelty and heartache. In the spirit of antagonistic cooperation, Morrison might refute some of Hurston’s claims and extend others.
“Southern Road” (1932) by Sterling A. Brown
With his debut poetry collection, “Southern Road,” Sterling A. Brown helped set the agenda for the next phase of Black literary production by confronting the living legacy of slavery, reflecting on mass migration and helping to codify the sound of Black voices in print. In poems like “Maumee Ruth,” “Strong Men” and the titular poem, “Southern Road,” Brown embraces rhyme and repetition and crafts lines that dilate and contract with intention. (Morrison exerts a similar control in her prose, using indirection and understatement as tools to enlist readers in the difficult work of making meaning.) Above all, Brown’s language is mutable, shifting from eye dialect that reads like sheet music for a performance of voices we might have heard to “standard” English diction that nonetheless bends toward the patterns of colloquial speech. His poems are about slavery and segregation and suffering, as well as dignity and resistance and resilience. In a 2020 foreword to “The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown,” where one can find the entire collection, the poet Cornelius Eady makes a striking claim for Brown’s enduring relevance for an era that knows the names Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. “The only items missing from these poems,” Eady writes, “are clicks, likes, and body cams.”
“Shave ’Em Dry” (1935) by Lucille Bogan
Ribald, even raunchy, Lucille Bogan’s blues — and this song in particular — reject the pieties propped up on both sides of the Black-and-white color line. Like Morrison, Bogan fearlessly embraces women’s sexuality and pleasure. She sings with swagger and no small amount of humor about the physical geometries of sex, and the powers and vulnerabilities of desire. Bogan was born in Mississippi and recorded vaudeville and blues songs for Okeh Records, a label Morrison mentions in “Jazz” more than once. Bogan would come to be recognized, alongside the now more-heralded Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, as one of the queens of the blues. Rainey recorded the earliest known version of “Shave ’Em Dry” in 1924. Two Bogan versions remain: a standard recording that generally follows the shape of Rainey’s original and an “after-hours” version with content that is every bit as sexually explicit as Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP.” Smith sang about her “Careless Love”; Bogan sings about grinding, hollering and the full extent of her sexual prowess. She has no use for euphemism, though she luxuriates in double entendre — setting it right beside more direct descriptions. At least in this regard, Bogan offers a contrast from Morrison, who once noted that the best sex scenes are those that leave most of the work to the reader’s imagination. Not so with “Shave ’Em Dry.”
Fire!! (1926)
This short-lived literary magazine — a younger, more radical offshoot of the foundational issue of Survey Graphic titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” (1925), which was followed by “The New Negro: An Interpretation,” both edited by the scholar and Harlem Renaissance architect Alain Locke — features some of the most experimental and confrontational art and literature of the era. It’s bolder, queerer and more uncompromising than Locke’s volumes. Fire!! was brought about by young ambition. Its subhead was A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, and youth was paramount: It was edited by the 24-year-old novelist Wallace Thurman and featured contributions from Gwendolyn Bennett (24), Richard Bruce Nugent (20), Countee Cullen (23), Arna Bontemps (24), Aaron Douglas (27), Arthur Huff Fauset (27), John P. Davis (21) and Hurston, a relatively senior figure at 35 (though by then she had long dissembled when it came to her age). Taken as a whole, the journal rejected the impulse to propagandize — even for the benevolent cause of racial uplift. Thus, these authors and artists shared with Morrison a fearlessness when it came to exploring the full humanity of Black Americans — including Black characters behaving badly.
“Romance in Marseille” (1929/2020) by Claude McKay
Claude McKay is a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and perhaps best known for his 1928 novel, “Home to Harlem,” and his sonnet of protest, “If We Must Die” (1919). “Romance in Marseille” is his rediscovered novel (and his third posthumous work), a book that was not lost but neglected: filed away in archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Yale University’s Beinecke Library. The scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell did the work of bringing the novel to publication and, in doing so, usefully complicating both McKay and American literary history. “Romance in Marseille” gives us a disabled protagonist (a double amputee) who lives a life of sybaritic pleasure. And though a heterosexual love affair is at the book’s center, McKay explores a far more expansive territory of desire and longing in this fitting complement to “Jazz.”
“Dark Princess: A Romance” (1928) by W.E.B. Du Bois
With his 1903 masterpiece, “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. Du Bois defined an American century and gifted us with a metaphor for bifurcated identity with his concept of double consciousness. By the time of the Harlem Renaissance, Du Bois was a towering presence who could come off at times as aloof and censorious. He understood the primary function of Black fiction to be propaganda: to correct the distorting lens of racist stereotypes with a clear image of Black virtue and excellence. But “Dark Princess,” his second novel and most ambitious literary work, is more complicated — and compelling — than that.
As the critic Claudia Tate argues, “‘Dark Princess’ offered Du Bois an opportunity to fulfill in fiction if not in fact his greatest ambitions, dreams and longings.” Among these are the end of Western imperialism and a model of marriage that balances physical passion and political activism. “Dark Princess” is equal parts polemical and fantastical; as Du Bois himself remarked, he aimed to enrobe “my heavy flesh of fact” with “that rich and colored gossamer of dream.” The narrative action begins in 1923, three years before that of “Jazz,” as the novel’s protagonist, a Black medical student named Matthew Townes, recently expelled from his program on account of racism, travels to Berlin, where he falls for an Indian princess, Kautilya, who happens to head up an interracial, international organization committed to dismantling imperialism. Townes returns to the United States with subversive intentions, attempting to organize a strike of Black railway porters and fomenting a plot to assassinate leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. The novel concludes with the birth of Matthew and Kautilya’s child, a multiracial messiah who might deliver freedom to all the oppressed peoples of the world. At the time of its publication, a reviewer for The New York Times labeled the plot “flamboyant and unconvincing.” For his part, Du Bois called “Dark Princess” “my favorite book.”
Top photos and videos: Damon Winter/The New York Times; Knopf Doubleday Group/Penguin Random House; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Archive Films/Getty Images; Alamy; Viking Press; © Van Vechten Trust; Addison Scurlock/National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; Sheridan Libraries/Levy/Gado/Getty Images
