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No one expected Carl Van Vechten's 1926 novel Nigger Heaven to cause quite the stir that it did. Certainly not Walter White, the author and NAACP activist. "One can judge," wrote White in June 1926, "how far we have progressed when one notes the calmness with which the title of Mr. Van Vechten's book has been received. Intelligent Negroes simply say, 'We will wait and see what is in the story and let it go at that.'" Even then, two months before the publication of Nigger Heaven, White's tone was defensive, as though he hoped to fix the black community's reaction to Nigger Heaven in advance. His column continued:
The one violent protest which has come to my ears was that of a certain Negro whose conversation is heavily sprinkled with the words "darky" and "nigger." When I suggested to him that he eliminate from his own conversation words which he objected to from he lips of others, a deathly silence came over him and our conversation abruptly died. Soon afterward he remembered that he was already late for an important engagement downtown
Not only does this "certain Negro" use the word nigger himself; he is on the way to a meeting downtown -- that is, in the white world. The implicit claim is that blacks and whites are inextricably intertwined, and that neither race has exclusive title to any aspect of their cultural interchange. Educated people, apparently, are above such petty resentments. "There is seldom much prejudice of any sort," White wrote, "among those who are intelligent enough to do a bit of thinking and investigating for themselves" (16).
Nigger Heaven tested this claim, splitting the black community and causing vigorous protests for months after its publication. Walter White was in the minority, and like many of the novel's partisans, he had benefited from Van Vechten's friendship. Nonetheless, his early review raises some of the most vital issues in the furor surrounding the reception of Van Vechten's now-forgotten novel. What was the difference between "white" and "black" views of life in Harlem? Was the celebrated "New Negro" merely, as George Schuyler had argued in The Nation, a "lampblacked Anglo-Saxon" (663) or something entirely different? And if Negroes did possess their own separate "soul-world," as...