Arna Bontemps: Harlem renaissance writer, librarian and family man

On the blank side of a July 1960 calendar page, Arna Bontemps wrote a message to himself for an autobiography he never finished. Its planned title was A Man's Name. The note read: "I speak for the tormented souls who are doomed to struggle through life with unusual or difficult names." Arna Bontemps was nearly 60 years old when he cited this mission for his life's story. He was already well established among the most distinguished African American authors of the 20th century, and like his long-time friend Langston Hughes, his career was launched with the publication of a poem in The Crisis.

This fall marks the centennial anniversary of Arna Bontemps's birth. He was born 100 years ago in October. Few who knew him when he was growing up in the early 20th century would have guessed that the shy, soft-spoken youngster would become the acknowledged chronicler of his culture and conscience of his age. Fewer still would have imagined that the city of Chicago would honor him with a public middle school bearing his name or that a novel written by him would reach Broadway as a hit musical. His parents surely would have been astonished by all of this and stunned to learn that the very house in Alexandria, La., in which their first child was born would be preserved as the first African American museum in the state and that the centennial of his birth would be celebrated by the parish from which the family fled.

It is not as if distinction lay beyond Bontemps' youthful reach. Family and teachers considered him an exceptional youngster. "I had a rather precocious memory; I've never lost it. All during my childhood I continually amazed my parents and my many relatives by the things that I remembered," he told me in a 1971 interview in Nashville. It would have been the nature of his career that would have surprised others rather than the fact of it. With his parents' conversion to Seventh-Day Adventism, he seemed well on his way to a career in the ministry. The conversion contributed to Bontemps' deepening need to decipher his personal heritage.

Years of self-probing and rendering led to Bontemps' legacy of some 40 published works, including poetry, fiction, history, folklore and biography. He authored and co-authored writings expressly for children and adolescents; he edited and co-edited anthologies intended to inform the American public about African American life and culture; and he produced dozens of reviews of new books for syndicated newspapers and for The Crisis. His friend Langston Hughes spoke of him as "the scholar, a man of learning and sound judgment" - and turned again and again to Bontemps for his insights and advice.

The Area Wendell Bontemps papers housed at Syracuse University spanning 1888 to 1997 (the collection includes early family materials and posthumous analysis and criticism of his work) are testament to a long and energetic career. The list of correspondents reads like a who's who in 20th-century African American history and letters: W.C. Handy, Countee Cullen, Mary Church Terrell, Walter White, Alain Locke, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Roy Wilkins, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks and on and on. Previously unpublished works from this collection still discover publishers decades later. For example, Oxford University Press recently published two of Bontemps' books for children written during the 1930s: The Pasteboard Bandit (1997), co-written with Langston Hughes, and Bubber Goes to Heaven (1998), titles over which his estate retains ownership.

For nearly half a century, Bontemps sustained a richly versatile career combining the roles of husband and father with those of teacher, scholar, author, critic, librarian, archivist and lecturer. Among his New Negro or Harlem Renaissance peers, none matched this breadwinner's simultaneous commitments to family and art. Few in the 20th century, for that matter, could lay claim to such distinction.

Legacy aside, at the later stages of his life Bontemps still troubled over identity. Americans far and wide found the French Bontemps (Bahntemps) difficult to manage and impossible to pronounce. The Christian name Ama, with its insinuation of the feminine, caused no end of unease and challenged his spirit. "It was probably what remained of Arnaud after my mother had reduced it," was his best explanation. Rather than alter his parents' deed, as some suggested he should, Bontemps accepted the challenge. In truth, the unusual name provoked "the more evasive question: who was I?" The question sparked a questing and gave rise to his life's work. "I could not have guessed then, however, that half a century would slip by before I would be disposed to give some continuity to my inquiries," Bontemps wrote in a draft of his unpublished autobiography.

In the summer of 1924, as he traveled from Los Angeles to New York City, "Who am I?" was Bontemps' big question. He was 21 and - having graduated from Pacific Union College a year earlier - full of hope and apprehension. The Crisis had just launched his national career by accepting his poem "Hope" for publication in its August issue: "My lone and dismal life's afloat/upon the seas like an empty boat."

Gloomy as the lines appear, Bontemps was bolstered by advice from the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson: "To travel hopefully is better." This pronouncement, appropriated from Stevenson's essay "El Dorado," had already become Bontemps' measuring stick. By the time he moved to Harlem in the era of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, Bontemps' life had already taken many odd turns.

Bontemps' mother, Maria Pembroke, was the third daughter of proud mulatto parents residing in the Red River village of Alexandria, La., after the Civil War. All the Pembroke women were accomplished seamstresses. Maria (often called Mariah), a staunch Methodist, also was a schoolteacher who loved the arts and read poetry.

His father, Paul Bontemps, descended from a French Catholic settler and his African concubine residing on the Avoyelles prairie south of Alexandria. The men of this French-speaking region were farmers and skilled artisans. Paul was a brick and stone mason and a devout avowed Catholic with a flair for the jazz trombone.

When the couple married in 1901, Paul retired his horn and his association with an itinerant jazz group out of respect for Maria, but having to say her wedding vows as a Catholic did not sit well with Maria. It was no easier for her following Bontemps' birth on October 13, 1902. He was quickly baptized Catholic as was his sister, Ruby, two years later.

Still, some 70 years later, Bontemps wrote: "There should be a word like mulatto to signify half Protestant and half Catholic, because that is what I am by birth and by persuasion. Negroes, I suspect, chose their church not on the basis of theology but whether or not they are made to feel at home." He was thinking as much about his parents' early dilemma as he was his own adulthood.

The desire to feel at home convinced his parents to abandon Louisiana for the early Watts section of Los Angeles. It's true that violent Jim Crow racism and dreaded tuberculosis were key factors in their decision to abandon the South, but religion remained an unresolved problem. They soon found relief, however, in Seventh-Day Adventism and were among the earliest Black adherents to this peculiar religion. Adventism, therefore, was Bontemps' second baptism. His sojourn in California lasted 18 years, and the church would be his source of anxiety for many years.

Bontemps and his sister attended Adventist schools, practiced Saturday Sabbaths and meatless diets and were strictly required to shun works of fiction. Church prohibitions were unsettling at first, but Bontemps grew truly somber after his mother suffered a withering death in 1914 from tuberculosis. He was nearly 12. Her death divided the small family.

Bontemps stayed under the care of his father. Sister Ruby went to live with an aunt, who had joined them in southern California. The arrangement led to a contest of wills between father and son, partly due to Paul Bontemps' deepening commitment to Adventism and his ambition for his son.

Three years later, Paul Bontemps packed Ama Bontemps off to a church preparatory academy in the San Fernando Valley with instructions "not to go up there acting colored." He was 14. The advice reflected Paul's concern that grandmother Pembroke's bachelor brother, great-uncle Buddy, recently arrived from Louisiana, was a negative influence on young Arna with his folksy language and devil-may-care attitude. Bontemps, however, loved his great uncle's spicy language, his dialect stories about ghosts and preachers and his down home tales about slaves and masters. Uncle Buddy half-believed in signs and charms and mumbo jumbo, and he believed wholeheartedly in ghosts, Ama recalled.

Bontemps was the youngest student at the academy. Painfully shy and reserved though he was, he excelled academically, as he later remembered: "Except for the studies, which I had enjoyed, it had been a dismal experience." His assigned roommate was the well-to-do Owen Troy, three years his senior and the only other colored student on campus. It didn't occur to Bontemps that the assignments were based on a Jim Crow practice until he was left to room alone when no other Black student was on campus and a White student was refused permission to move into the vacated space. This unseemly practice, however, wasn't limited to the San Fernando Academy, as Bontemps found out. Celebrated Pacific Union College on Howell Mountain high in the Napa Valley practiced the same hypocrisy.

It was in the fall of 1920 when Bontemps started a three-year sojourn, as he put it, on a lost or unexplored planet with "the peculiar people" - the Adventists. He showed a new-found confidence and a rich baritone voice to match it. "I had discovered self-expression in a new dimension." He rose in the eyes of his fellow students and his instructors. School records reveal that his intentions were to prepare for the ministry. The breathtaking setting of Pacific Union College was not to be denied, and Bontemps luxuriated in the beauty of the mighty redwoods of Howell Mountain. Once again he was assigned to room with Owen Troy. But now he perceived with clarity that other Negroes at the college were separated in the same fashion.

The form of his new self-expression included writing poetry and essays under a progressive young teacher named Charles Weniger, whose choice of writings by Robert Louis Stevenson as models for instruction struck a chord with Bontemps. He had read the adventure tales Treasure Island and Kidnapped surreptitiously during summer breaks from school and loved them. He also was fascinated to learn that the Scottish writer had struggled all his life with tuberculosis, the very illness Bontemps had come to know so intimately.

It's reasonable to assume that Weniger chose Stevenson's work for its strong moral vision. The essay "El Dorado," however, startled Bontemps by seeming to challenge moral authority with the words: "Of making books there is no end, complained the preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was praising letters as an occupation. There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel, or to gathering wealth." It seemed to Bontemps that Stevenson's pronouncements came perilously close to winking at the Adventist church's objection to forbidden writings, imaginative tales.

Already growing skeptical, Bontemps was hardly prepared to rush off to begin a mission of making books, but Stevenson's essay left a deep and lasting imprint. In time, it would provide the freedom and the principle to challenge contradictory practices wherever they occurred.

Bontemps completed Pacific Union College in three years with a major in English and a minor in history, indicating a change of plans from a career in the ministry. Perhaps the motive for this change is reflected in Bontemps' words:

"Had I not gone home summers and hobnobbed with folk-type Negroes, I would have finished college without knowing that any Negro other than Paul Laurence Dunbar ever wrote a poem. I would have come out imagining that the story of the Negro could be told in two short paragraphs: a statement about jungle people in Africa and an equally brief account of the slavery issue in American history. Stevenson's El Dorado, an idealized place, like brotherhood and freedom, was a mission worth pursuing without end."

Bontemps returned to Los Angeles only to find himself at loose ends. Circumstances at home were in flux. His sister Ruby had just finished a two-year program at Pacific Union College and was engaged to marry Owen Troy, Bontemps' roommate. His father, a widower since the death of Maria, was making plans to remarry.

Bontemps found work at the Los Angeles post office and began sending poems to national magazines, including The Crisis. As word of his ambitions made the rounds at the post office, he was introduced to Wallace Thurman, a postal worker and aspiring writer from Utah. Both set their sights on New York. A letter from literary editor Jessie Fauset accepting "Hope" for the August 1924 issue of The Crisis gave Bontemps the lift he needed to set himself in motion.

Prospects already existed in New York for a job teaching at the Harlem Academy, an Adventist high school on West 127th Street. Bontemps had recently attended a Marcus Garvey Back-to-Africa rally at the Los Angeles Forum and was electrified by its energy and spirit. But he was also thrilled by the prospects of seeing Broadway and

Major League Baseball. The decision to go to Harlem was fixed. Wallace Thurman (later known for his novels The Blacker the Berry (1929) and Infants of Spring (1932)) would follow later.

Reflecting on this resolve some 50 years later, Bontemps was philosophical: "By pressuring me to join the church at the age of 8, as I reasoned, they had left me free to grow in truth and knowledge of the word, as they often said. I felt that I was doing just that. Dogma was for the birds. Me? My heart was a leaf. At 211 was on a train crossing the continent. I still hated to disappoint my father. I remained bound by love to old associates. But to peculiar dogma, not at all. If it existed where I was going, I might have to suffer for a while, but could at least keep my fingers crossed."

To be sure, peculiar dogma did exist where Bontemps was going, again and again. He suffered some, and he got into the habit of traveling with his fingers crossed. He paused for seven disciplined years in New York at the Harlem Academy, writing meditative verse and submitting them to The Crisis and Opportunity (the Urban League publication). He won three awards in quick succession. Two for the Opportunity prize for 1926 ("Golgotha is a Mountain") and 1927 ("The Return"). Crisis honored "Nocturne at Bethesda" in 1926 with the prize in its first poetry contest: "Years have wrinkled you. I know, Bethesda!/You are sad. It is the same with me."

Alberta Johnson, an Adventist high school student recently arrived from Waycross, Ga., interpreted the spirit of Bontemps' meditative mood and he in turn recognized a compelling quality about her. "She was just 16 when we first met, but I thought of her immediately as a mother. Young as she was, the image of the mother became her. Two years later in 1926 the two wed and raised six children, two of whom were born in Harlem.

"New York was just like a Garden of Eden for ambitious Blacks at the time. They would have parties, the literary people. But because I was never at the parties, I was a mystery to them," Alberta Bontemps, 95, recently said.

The marriage also marked the beginning of Bontemps' period of biographical narrative. His early subjects were his exiled California relatives, but these efforts were frustrated until 1931 when Harcourt Brace published God Sends Sunday, his first novel. It was a tale of an irrepressible Black jockey named Little Augie, inspired by great-uncle Buddy. The Great Depression was underway, however, and the book didn't sell well. And as Bontemps must have expected, the title provoked stormy criticism from the Adventist Church just at the time he was leaving Harlem for Huntsville, Ala., to teach at Oakwood Junior College, a segregated institution with a predominantly White staff.

It was in Oakwood where the concept of freedom emerged as the principal theme of Bontemps' work. This first taste of the Deep South since his childhood inspired him to find the forms and the means to make a ministry of books. "They were lean years, but they were very, very good years from my point of view, I would say. They were productive. At least I didn't get entirely destroyed by the Depression, although I felt it enough to be egged on. I wrote quite a lot under adverse conditions."

"It was the best of times and the worst of times to run to that state for refuge," Bontemps said years later. "It was a place of rediscovery and encounters with folk reminiscent of great-uncle Buddy, rich in spirit and imagination. It was a world of natural beauty and abundance, and one did not see evidences of hunger." But it was also a world of segregation sustained by fear and violence and the denial of freedom. They were the trial years of the celebrated nine Scottsboro Boys at nearby Decatur. The White community was suspicious of strangers of any shade.

Bontemps stepped into this environment with his unpronounceable name and with sheer determination made this tension-filled time the most inventive period of his career. He rose mornings at sun up to write before breakfast and classes, and returned evenings to a makeshift desk when dinner was through, a practice that became a lifetime habit.

He wrote a succession of short stories set in the rural south, including his best-known "Summer Tragedy." He published two juvenile novels written about children of color, one in collaboration with Langston Hughes, initiating his reputation as a leading writer of literature for young people. He paved the way for his inspired historical novel about the Gabriel Prosser slave insurrection in Virginia, Black Thunder (1936), the first of three historical narratives in the 1930s. He initiated the long process of ghostwriting W. C. Handy's autobiography.

Inevitably at Oakwood the nature of Bontemps' activity aroused suspicion. He weathered the strain at the school for three years before administrators tested his loyalty to church doctrine by demanding that he destroy his collection of secular books. His refusal resulted in the loss of his job in 1934. With nowhere else to turn and with embarrassment, Bontemps retreated with his family to his father's small home back in California.

This momentary retreat could not slow the momentum Bontemps had already gathered. His heritage was enclosed in the dynamic atmosphere and spirit of this cultural South, and they were his to claim. Bontemps left California for Chicago, where he spent seven years writing, editing and studying, and earning a master's degree in library science from the University of Chicago in 1943. In the Windy City, he struck up lifetime associations with writers Margaret Walker, Richard Wright and Jack Conroy, as well as sociologist Horace Cayton. But when the offer arrived to be librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., he leapt at the opportunity to return to the old South to rejoin former Harlem colleagues Aaron Douglas, the artist, and Charles S. Johnson, noted editor/sociologist of Opportunity fame and (in 1947) the first Black president of Fisk.

During this time his youngest child, Arna Alexander Bontemps, was born. Eight years younger than his closest sibling, "Alexander," a professor of African American studies at Arizona State University, remembers feeling like he had his father to himself. "I came to intellectual life by simply running free in his study without direction. He just let me go. Because I was reading what he read or what he had written, we always had something to talk about," says Alexander Bontemps, 57.

"My own life is focused on things so closely related to the interests that we shared. I am completely permeated by his influence."

At Fisk, the elder Bontemps influence has persisted. He showed himself to be a brilliant American archivist without diminishing his own production. He arranged Fisk's George Gershwin collection as the cultural and racial counterpart to Yale University's James Weldon Johnson collection. Single-handedly he acquired for Fisk's library the bulk of collected personal papers of two giants in African American literature: Charles W. Chesnutt and Jean Toomer.

Meanwhile, the musical St. Louis Woman based on Bontemps' first novel written in 1937 and dramatized with Countee Cullen reached Broadway in 1946 with great fanfare and controversy; his juvenile history, The Story of the Negro won the highly coveted Jane Addams award in 1956; and with Langston Hughes he published two dynamic anthologies: The Poetry of the Negro (1963) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). Through these and more, his production never waned. Fisk seemed an El Dorado.

With the exception of interludes as distinguished visiting scholar at the University of Illinois and director of the Afro-American Program and curator of the James Weldon Johnson collection at Yale University, Bontemps completed his career at Fisk as poet-in-residence.

Bontemps died in Nashville on June 4, 1973. His life's story was his work-in-- progress. Bontemps is survived by his wife Alberta who still resides in the Nashville home they shared. Only two of their six children - Constance Bontemps and Alexander - are still living.

Bontemps' simple ecumenical service was presided over by a Protestant minister and a Catholic priest at the Fisk Memorial Chapel. Two weeks later, a memorial tribute was held at Christ Chapel, Riverside Church in Harlem. Several of Bontemps' verses were read. One was a note of humility: "When all our hopes are sown on stony ground,/and we have yielded up the thought of gain,/long after our last songs have lost their sound,/we may come back, we may come back again."

There is the hope of El Dorado in the music of those words. Ama Bontemps traveled hopefully in every imaginable literary form, chronicling the heritage of a race of Americans whose personal question may be "Who am I?" and whose answers lay in their inscriptions upon the culture of our country. His own body of works proclaims human passion for freedom and social justice.

It has not gone unacknowledged. A book in Bontemps' personal collection in Nashville entitled Go South to Sorrow bears the handwritten inscription: "For Arna Bontemps, who has done so much to show so many a path away from this sorrow. Best wishes, Carl Rowan."

Charles L. James is Sara Lawrence Lightfoot professor of English at Swarthmore College and chair of the department. He is working on a biography of Arna Bontemps.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Sep/Oct 2002
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