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Essay on Blacker the Berry and Quicksand
One of the most widely read and controversial works of the Harlem Renaissance, The Blacker the Berry...was the first novel to openly explore prejudice within the Black community. This pioneering novel found a way beyond the bondage of Blackness in American life to a new meaning in truth and beauty.
Emma Lou Brown's dark complexion is a source of sorrow and humiliation -- not only to herself, but to her lighter-skinned family and friends and to the white community of Boise, Idaho, her home-town. As a young woman, Emma travels to New York's Harlem, hoping to find a safe haven in the Black Mecca of the 1920s. Wallace Thurman re-creates this legendary time and place in rich detail, describing Emma's visits to nightclubs and dance halls and house-rent parties, her sex life and her catastrophic love affairs, her dreams and her disillusions -- and the momentous decision she makes in order to survive.
For some people black is black. But not for the main character in Blacker the Berry, Emma Lou. She is very black in a family that is not that black. This book is about her struggle against color prejudice from the white world in the 20s but also within the black world. She tries fighting this but trying to be whiter and also by bleaching her skin to appear whiter, but mostly to no avail (Taylor).
This Harlem Renaissance novel is a lost classic in African-American literature that must be reintroduced. My one and only complaint is that sometimes the novel did not transition well between the two separate narrations of Emma Lou and Alva. This problem, however, is easily minuscule by the overall hard-hitting message of the book. At times I found myself getting infuriated by Emma Lou's seemingly silly and immature ways regarding color....
