Thirteen terse lines make up Edward Silvera’s poem “Finality,” a noteworthy piece in Volume I, Issue I of FIRE!! A Quarterly Dedicated to Younger Negro Artists (1926). Silvera succinctly describes the irrevocability of death, drawing upon imagery of the natural world while incorporating the idea of the soul in relation to the nature imagery in…
Category: Harlem Renaissance Packet
The Beauty and Pain of “The Southern Road”
In Helene Johnson’s poem “A Southern Road”, Johnson describes both the beauty and pain of the South. What starts off as a beautiful piece describing the nature of the environment the reader is in soon takes a turn into something that becomes much more morbid. This shift is evident especially in terms of the use…
First Class Ticket in a Second Class Coach
Gwendolynn Bennett’s short- story, “The Wedding Day,” revolves around one black- male character and his resentment of the white-American race. The story uses tired gender norms of masculinity to portray Paul’s innate strength, short-temper, and heroic attitude. He seems invincible when it come to his white-male enemy. Paul beats up any white americans who use…
Understanding Cordelia From The Outside-In and Inside-Out
In the literary collection FIRE!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists (1926), Wallace Thurman’s “Cordelia the Crude” bluntly portrays the main character Cordelia as a prostitute in Harlem, New York. From the story’s introduction, we are provided with a third person limited perspective of who Cordelia is— a 16-year-old, light brown-skinned girl from Charleston, South Carolina…
Who Can Taste the Jungle
The poem “Jungle Taste” in FIRE!! written by Edward Silvera consists of two stanzas parallel in rhythmic construction calling attention to the minor differences between the two and the similarities throughout upon comparison. The topic of the first centers around black men and their songs of coarseness, weirdness, and strangeness, whereas the second comments of…
Cordelia’s Game of Life
In Cordelia the Crude, author Wallace Thurman creates a “me vs. you” environment both for the readers and the narrator. Cordelia’s entire life is described as a long battle that she is neither winning nor losing. It is difficult for the reader to pinpoint where Cordelia stands in her life, which presents a mind game…
Physicality and Crudeness
As I read Wallace Thurman’s “Cordelia the Crude,” the first short story in FIRE!!, I became interested in the relationship the story established between what is physical and what is “crude.” I traced the appearance of the word “physical” and images of physicality in order to examine the story’s tone with regard to physicality. I…
Death Bed Identity
Waring Cuney, one of the contributors of poetry to the October-31st-published issue of FIRE!!, speaks in “The Death Bed” of a black man’s thoughts as his life is coming to a close, upon the bed the title deems his death bed. Upon their deathbeds, it is common for individuals to reflect upon their identities, molded…
“Race Champions”: Taking away the Morning Star
In Zora Neale Hurston’s essay Art and Such (1938), the author is able to use an extended metaphor to reinforce how the “Race Champions “of the time actually create barriers for black Americans to produce their own original and authentic art that comes from their creativity. In particularly on page 5, Hurston introduces the hypothetical thoughts or…
An Uphill Battle
In Hugh’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, he uses the image of a mountain to represent the obstacle “in the way of true Negro art;” it is the “race towards whiteness” and “the desire to pour race individuality into the mold of American standardization.” Du Bois also uses the image of a mountain…
Black Matter 