Dark Tower and the Saturday Nighters: Salons as Themes in African American Drama

Abstract

Dark Tower and the Saturday Nighters:Salons as Themes in African American Drama David Krasner (bio) Salons and magazines establish formidable institutions of aesthetic criticism. Beginning in eighteenth-century Europe, Jürgen Habermas contends, salons and magazines situate where the "lay judgment of a public" arises.1 A similar intellectually stimulating condition occurred during the Harlem Renaissance. George Hutchinson writes that the Harlem Renaissance emphasized "the emergence of a whole new matrix of magazines" allied with the New Negro movement. According to Hutchinson, magazines were "especially interesting because of the way the clustering of audiences and contributors linked people across boundaries of genres as well as of race."2 Magazines have enjoyed scholarly attention because they endure as written archives. By contrast salons, like theatre, have been undervalued largely because they belong to ephemera and oral history. Nevertheless, salons facilitated a forum for artists to evaluate each other's work. They played a critical role in the clustering of ideas, in linking people across genres, and in influencing themes germane to African American drama. This essay will examine two specific themes symbolized by two representative salons during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1922, the award-winning author Georgia Douglas Johnson opened her home at 1461 S Street, NW in Washington D. C. for artists. Gwendolyn Bennett described the salon as the "Saturday Niters of Washington."3 It was also referred to as the "Halfway House," because, in Johnson's words, it was "a place where anyone who would fight halfway to survive could do so."4 Langston Hughes reported in The Big Sea that the assembled guests, among them Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Marita [End Page 81] Bonner, discussed "poetry and books and plays."5 According to Johnson's friend and fellow playwright Willis Richardson, the meetings often lasted into the following morning.6 In 1927, A'Lelia Walker, daughter of the cosmetic entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, purchased brownstones at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem. Walker, whom Langston Hughes dubbed "the joy goddess of Harlem's 1920's,"7 converted a floor of her mansion into the "Dark Tower" named after Countée Cullen's Opportunity magazine column. Dark Tower's walls were festooned with poems by Hughes and Cullen. According to habitué Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker "saw a real need for a place, a sufficiently sympathetic place, in which [artists] could meet and discuss their plans and arts.… [Dark Tower] was to have enough quiet dignity to impart weight to the poetry evenings."8 The salon was later euphemistically known as "Niggeratti Manor" from Wallace Thurman's acerbic 1932 roman á clef Infants of the Spring. Dark Tower folded a year after its opening as a result of Walker's financial setbacks and lack of sustained interest among artists. Johnson's salon, too, declined owing to the Great Depression. Yet both left a lasting impression. The salons shared the dynamic vision of their hostesses Johnson and Walker and many participants frequented both locales (Madam C. J. Walker's beauty shop in Harlem, where she produced and sold many of her groundbreaking hair products, also served as a salon for black middle-class women). These salons symbolized two different aesthetic themes in African American drama, the first of which I call the "space of experience" and second the "horizon of expectation." Space of experience represents works that are experiential and participatory rather than abstract and literary. They represent theatrical performances rather than dramatic texts and are based on vernacular, grass-root folklore. Ralph Ellison describes this type of salon when he says that "Negro folklore, evolving within a larger culture which regarded it as inferior, was an especially courageous expression. It announced the Negro's willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensibilities as the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to define these crucial matters for him."9 Horizon of expectation is art signifying possibility and transformation. It is literary rather than performative. It, too, is rooted in folk tradition, but it primarily asserts the message of redemption and uplift. W.E.B. Du Bois's description of the Spirituals best exemplifies this salon concept...