In Memoriam: Dorothy West; 1907-1998

Abstract

"My mother sent me to school. I'm four years old, everybody else is six," [Dorothy West] later recalled. "And she says to me, don't you come back in this house and tell me any white child is smarter than you. White people are thinking while you're sleeping. You'd better get up early in the morning to get ahead of them."

Although Dorothy West was an only child, she grew up in a house with cousins whom her mother also raised. The family lived in a predominantly white neighborhood and the children attended an all-white school. Dorothy West was dark skinned. But her cousins were very light skinned and the other schoolchildren thought they were white. At school West's cousins often fought to protect her when the kids would say, "Don't play with that nigger." The racial insults changed the direction of her life. West recalled: "I used writing as an excuse for not going out to play. That was the beginning of my writing."

When West returned to the United States, she associated with many of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance including Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, Wallace Thurman, [Richard Wright], and [Zora Neale Hurston] with whom she briefly shared an apartment. The poet [Countee Cullen] had once proposed marriage to West but she turned him down. Cullen's father thought marriage would "cure" his son's homosexuality.

In Memoriam: Dorothy West; 1907-1998

Dorothy West died this past August at age 91. She is remembered as the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, the dramatic black cultural awakening that peaked between 1923 and 1929. She was the youngest of the great literary figures of the period who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Dorothy West was born in Boston in 1907. Her father, Isaac West, an emancipated slave, was known as the Black Banana King. He operated a highly successful wholesale fruit business in Boston. West's mother, Rachel Benson West, was one of 22 children. Light skinned and considered very beautiful, West's mother was sent north by her parents who were concerned that their daughter was vulnerable to sexual abuse by white men in the South.

"My mother sent me to school. I'm four years old, everybody else is six," Dorothy West later recalled. "And she says to me, don't you come back in this house and tell me any white child is smarter than you. White people are thinking while you're sleeping. You'd better get up early in the morning to get ahead of them."

Although Dorothy West was an only child, she grew up in a house with cousins whom her mother also raised. The family lived in a predominantly white neighborhood and the children attended an all-white school. Dorothy West was dark skinned. But her cousins were very light skinned and the other schoolchildren thought they were white. At school West's cousins often fought to protect her when the kids would say, "Don't play with that nigger." The racial insults changed the direction of her life. West recalled: "I used writing as an excuse for not going out to play. That was the beginning of my writing."

In 1923 West graduated from Girls' Latin School in Boston and attended Boston University. The following year, at age 17, she shared second prize with Zora Neale Hurston in a writing contest sponsored by the Urban League's Opportunity magazine. When West went to New York City to accept her prize, Hurston convinced her to stay.

Dorothy West was to spend nearly two decades in New York. In 1929 she had a small part in the original version of Porgy and Bess and in 1932 went to the Soviet Union with Langston Hughes and 25 other Negro intellectuals to make a film about black poverty in America. But the film was never made.

When West returned to the United States, she associated with many of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance including Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston with whom she briefly shared an apartment. The poet Countee Cullen had once proposed marriage to West but she turned him down. Cullen's father thought marriage would "cure" his son's homosexuality.

In 1934 West founded the literary magazine Challenge, later called New Challenge. Her coeditor was Richard Wright. The magazine published many of the young Negro writers of the period, including Ralph Ellison's first published piece, Creative and Cultural Lag.

In 1945 West moved back to Boston eventually settling in Oaks Bluff on Martha's Vineyard. The following year she published her first book, The Living Is Easy. The book illuminated intraracial and class conflict within the black community, especially the shallowness within New England's black bourgeoisie. West started work on her second novel, The Wedding, during the 1960s but suspended work when she concluded that the book would be criticized by black radicals. She finished the novel a quarter-century later but only after Doubleday editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis saw her columns in the local Martha's Vineyard newspaper and encouraged her to continue.

"To her death," Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in The New Yorker, "West maintained that the only truthful way to write about black America was a diversity of colors, of classes, and of sensibilities -- united only by a common history and, at times, a common enemy. As a twentieth-century writer, she knew that depicting the lives of colored people with unsparing intimacy, and without ideology or argument, might just be the most revolutionary thing she could do."

Article copyright CH II Publishers, Inc.

Article copyright TLC Private Operating Foundation.

Illustration (Dorothy West, the youngest member of the Harlem Renaissance)