57 pages • 1 hour read
The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2 Summary: “Harlem”
Like Part 1, Part 2 begins with a reflection on race, class, and colorism. Emma Lou has left USC without completing her degree after three years. She is now in Harlem, the epicenter of Black culture in America during the 1920s and 1930s. Emma Lou is in a newly rented apartment, feigning sleep so that John, the man with whom she spent the last two nights, can leave without saying goodbye. After a brief liaison, Emma decides that John is not the right sort of boyfriend, and although he is dismayed at her rejection, Emma Lou shows very little empathy for him. Since arriving in Harlem, she has been the subject of much gossip, both at home and among her former USC classmates. Friends and family are scandalized by her decision to leave college, her move to Harlem, and her sexual activity. Emma Lou, however, is not ashamed of her short-lived tryst with John.
As Emma Lou quietly waits for John to leave, she contemplates her new haircut, hoping that it flatters her face enough to distract from her dark skin. Thurman notes Emma Lou is “always speculating on how good looking she might have been if she had not been so black” (32). On this particular day, Emma Lou plans to seek employment, hopefully as a stenographer in a Black-owned firm. Emma walks to an employment agency and is struck by the loud, chaotic, and hurried pace of life in Harlem.
The first employment agency’s atmosphere mirrors the chaos of Harlem’s streets, and although she is specifically looking for stenographic work, she is instead offered a disappointing medley of domestic positions and kitchen jobs, work that Emma Lou finds unsuitable because of her education and high-class background. She does not, strictly speaking, have experience as a secretary, but she hopes that her secretarial coursework at USC will qualify her. It does not.
Disappointed, Emma Lou leaves the first agency and hopes that she will have better luck at another. She notes the preponderance of such agencies in Harlem and almost immediately finds a second. There, she has better luck initially, partially because of her polite mannerisms but also because she bends the truth, telling the hiring manager that she has secretarial experience. She is almost immediately offered a full-time position at Angus and Brown, a Black-owned real estate firm in Harlem.
When Emma Lou arrives at Angus and Brown, she notes the light complexions of the Black secretaries who work there, their “pert” blue suits, and the frequency with which they powder their noses. She immediately feels that her Blackness is on display and that these office women have taken note of her dark complexion. Almost immediately after arriving, Emma Lou is rejected; a young secretary informs Emma that Mr. Brown already has someone else in mind for the position. The woman blushes anxiously, and Emma Lou is sure that she has been rejected because the “someone” Mr. Brown has in mind is a woman with lighter skin.
When she returns to the agency, the office manager, Mrs. Blake, invites her to lunch. Mrs. Blake obliquely tells Emma Lou that most Harlem business owners prefer employees with lighter skin and adds that they often hire from a pool of their own friends and family members. She advises Emma Lou to enter a teachers college and tells her that she will have an easier time finding a position in the public school system. Emma bristles at this well-intentioned advice. She left a similar program at USC because she envisioned an entirely different life for herself, the life of a “pert” office worker in Black-run Harlem. She leaves lunch in a foul mood and, not wanting to return to her dingy apartment, wanders the neighborhood streets. There, she reflects on her liaison with John, musing that he was too “dark,” too uneducated, and too “country” to be her type and that she prefers educated men with light complexions. A man fitting that description walks by, and Emma Lou boldly looks at him, hoping to be noticed. He ignores her and walks on. She then encounters a group of men who ridicule her dark skin, noting that she is “too Black” to be romantically desirable.
Part 2 Analysis
In Part 2, Thurman continues to engage with the theme of The Politics of Black Respectability. This section of the novel opens with a description of Emma Lou’s first sexual relationship in Harlem. She had a short-lived liaison with a man named John, whom she quickly tired of and rejected. Although John is dismayed, Emma has not formed an emotional bond and is happy to move on. As in her relationship with Weldon, Emma feels none of the shame that her mother or grandmother would feel after a pre-marital sexual encounter, and as John leaves, she quickly refocuses her inner monologue on herself. This refusal to conform to societal standards of chastity and respectability is an important aspect of Emma Lou’s characterization and speaks to Thurman’s own position on the politics of respectability. He rejected the notion that Black Americans needed to be particularly moral and upstanding to gain respect from white society. Emma Lou embodies Thurman’s spirit of defiance in her steadfast rejection of the notion that her strength of character rests solely on perceived chastity and virtue.
The Hypocrisy of Colorism in Black Communities is also on further display in this section, primarily through Emma Lou’s experiences seeking employment. Although Emma Lou is educated, well-mannered, well-dressed, and polite, she is not welcome in the upper echelons of Harlem society because of her dark skin. Colorism functions as a set of unwritten societal rules, and the office manager at the second employment agency tells her as much after she is rejected at Angus & Brown, a firm where Emma Lou desperately wants to belong but stands out among the employees who have lighter skin tones than she does. These employees frequently powder their noses, symbolizing how in a colorist society, simply having lighter skin isn’t enough; there is constant effort applied toward appearing whiter.
Thurman also depicts Emma Lou’s own colorism in this section. She judges several people waiting in the first employment agency for their skin color, and as Part 2 comes to a close, Emma Lou reflects that her rejection of John was partly because she thought he was “too dark,” too southern, and too uneducated to be a long-term prospect. Much of the imagery in this section speaks to the way that Thurman symbolically uses Blackness as a mark of perceived “inferiority.” In particular, Emma Lou’s characterization of a female domestic worker in the first employment agency reinforces the racist notion, so prevalent in 19th- and early 20th-century literature, that Blackness connotes inferiority wherever it appears, both in people and in objects. By having Emma Lou be both a victim and perpetrator of this ideology, Thurman highlights how arbitrary it ultimately is.
This portion of the novel also evidences one of Thurman’s key motifs: the chaos and cacophony of Harlem. Emma Lou’s walk to the first of two employment agencies is hurried and chaotic, and it showcases the hectic pace of life in Harlem. Thurman’s tone shifts in this portion of the text, and his writing pace becomes more frenetic. The language mirrors the loud, discordant Harlem streetscape and is meant to show the reader how different Harlem is from Los Angeles. Thurman is not the only Harlem Renaissance author to use this rhetorical technique. Chaos as a motif in descriptions of Harlem is also a hallmark of Langston Hughes’s poetry. The Weary Blues is particularly illustrative of this style of writing. Although loud and chaotic, Harlem streets also convey a sense of possibility and would have been particularly meaningful to readers at the time of the novel’s publication. Black Harlem was a new, evolving space borne out of the forces of industrialization, the Great Migration, and sociocultural shifts that came about during and after the Reconstruction era. Harlem was chaotic, confusing, and destabilizing but was also the space of so much possibility for Black Americans. Emma Lou’s experience there mirrors this broader trend, and although there are moments when the cacophony of the streets overwhelms her, it is ultimately in Harlem where she forges a new identity and comes to terms with what it means for her to be a modern, Black woman.
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