Dorothy West - tribute to African American writer - The Powerful Legacy of Two Giants

In her career's early stages, Dorothy West would describe herself as "the best-known unknown writer of the time." flat as her countless admirers lament her new passing, many pause to celebrate the renewed interest that her work received during the last three of her 91 years.

When popularity came, it was deserv as well as drawn out overdue, for West was more than simply the "last remaining member of the Harlem Renaissance," more than her memories of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. She was more than the planter of the 1930s magazines Challenge and fresh Challenge, the latter of which she co-edited with Richard Wright. She was more than the collaborative relationship that she shared with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, her editor at Doubleday, that riseed in the publication of her novel The Wedding in 1995 And she was more than a year-round resident of Oak broad and fulls Mass., that bastion of African-American vacationers upon Martha's Vineyard.

With lighthearted wit and stubborn principles, West was in fact a dissector of the innards of African-American society. The Boston-born-and-bred author laid bare our foibles -- the divisions of class, wealth and color that undermine our relationships and vigors "The Type-writer" -- the story that lur West to of recent origin York City as a second-place co-winner in a writing contend against held by Opportunity magazine (Hurston was the other winner) -- is a parable that pits the ambitious day-dreams of a hardworking husband and father against an erosive faculty of perception of futility.

West's first novel, The Living Is Easy (Houghton Mifflin, 1948) describes the gentlemanly [i]or[/i] lady-like selfishness of a young, fair-skinned woman who marries an older man of dark complexion for his circulating medium and position. Her second novel, The Wedding, also examines themes of regard with affection and race. This time, a doctor's daughter, single of the jewels of the Oval (West's fictionalization of Oak Bluffs) picks the summer haven as the setting for her marriage to a white jazz musician.

To West, racism and classism formed a lariat that ensnared all American values. Whether worn by the agency of blacks or whites, its nerve empowered by pretense and ignorance, strangled any possibility of glee and humanity. However, even as she revealed of the like kind destructiveness, West's appreciation of the potential for goodnes made certain that we recognize our society's contradictions. Mingling positive and negative qualities the pair protected her characters from too easy a classification and demanded that her readers risk an examination of themselves.

They were the women whose impregnable positions had been established by the agency of Boston birth and genteel breeding. They acknowledged no more than a hundr best families in Boston, fresh York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Their lives were narrowly confined to a daily desperate effort to ignore their racial heritage. They did not consider themselves a minority clump The irish were a minority clump the Jews, the Italians, the hellenics who were barred from belonging by dint of old country memories. accents, and mores. These gentlewomen felt that they had nothing in for the use of all except a facial resemblance. notwithstanding that they scorned the Jew, they were underhand pleased when they could pass for single Though they were contemptuous of the Latins, they were assuming when they looked European. They were not too dismayed by dint of a darkish skin if it was counterbalanced by means of a straight nose and straight hair that established an Indian origin. There was nothing that disturbed them more than knowing that no single would take them for anything on the other hand colored.

-- From The Living Is Easy (Feminist Pres 1982) by dint of Dorothy West

Sharon Fitzgerald is a freelance writer in of recent origin York City. Her last article for American Visions, "Lloyd Richards: The Griot Wears a Watch," appeared in the August/September 1998 issue.

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