57 pages • 1 hour read
Wallace ThurmanThe Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life
Wallace ThurmanFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1929A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4 Summary: “Rent Party”
Alva and Emmy Lou have begun a relationship of sorts, although their meetings take place in movie theaters, parks, and at their homes rather than in the clubs and cabarets that Alva typically frequents. Alva is not turned off by Emma Lou’s dark complexion, but his friends would judge her for it, and in their company, he typically brings a more socially acceptable girlfriend named Geraldine, who has olive skin and straight hair. Often involved with multiple women simultaneously, Alva is an opportunistic dating partner and selects women for their willingness to provide financial assistance rather than any real romantic interest.
Alva realizes that Emma Lou has noticed his unwillingness to bring her into his social world, and when he is invited to a rent party by a young writer he knows, he decides to take her. He thinks that there will be less prejudice among the intelligentsia and that Emma Lou’s intellectual pretensions will allow her to fit in with a more educated crowd. When they arrive, Emma Lou shyly makes the acquaintance of Paul, Cora, Tony, and Truman, and then sits down to listen to the conversation that their arrival interrupted. Truman, Cora, and several other guests are engaging in a spirited conversation about colorism. Although colorism as a cultural phenomenon has been at the core of this novel, this is the first open conversation about it that Thurman provides. Truman argues that because African Americans live in a society that is both majority white and deeply racist, it is understandable (but not acceptable) that Black Americans would absorb some of the racism of their white counterparts. Furthermore, he argues, it is “natural” for humans, both individuals and in groups, to want to feel superior to other groups. For this reason, it makes sense that Black Americans with lighter skin would harbor prejudice toward their neighbors with dark skin tones. Although this is the first time that Emma Lou encounters awareness of the racism that has most impacted her, she is angry rather than awestruck. She doesn’t understand that their conversation isn’t an oblique criticism of her skin color. Shortly before the group gets up to change venues, Truman reveals that he was one of Emma Lou’s former classmates at USC.
The group makes their way to a loud, cacophonous party fueled by both corn liquor and the wild, syncopated rhythm of passionate jazz musicians. Emma Lou has several drinks and finds herself swept away by the music and atmosphere. She enters a state of near frenzy, and although she is aware of how out of character she is acting, she finds herself unable to calm down. The next morning, she wakes up at home with a terrible headache and her landlady pounding at the door. The woman objects to the state in which Emma Lou returned to the apartment the previous evening, and reprimanding her for her lack of respectability, she evicts her.
Although she has just been given three days to leave her home, Emma Lou finds herself distracted and unmotivated to do anything other than lie in bed and let her mind wander. She thinks about the events of the previous evening and decides that Alva’s friends were neither intellectual nor respectable, and the party itself had been vulgar. This leads her to reflect further on her relationship with Alva, and her inner monologue paints him in an unflattering light. Alva has an alcohol addiction, and his personality turns sour without his daily allotment of drinks. Although he has been kind to Emma Lou, he is an expert manipulator. He actively seeks out romantic partners who will support him financially. He has been married twice and hasn’t bothered to obtain a divorce from either woman. He enjoys the sound of his own voice and appreciates Emma Lou’s willingness to listen to his arrogant reminiscences. In spite of all of this, Emma Lou comes to the conclusion that she loves him, and perhaps the answer to her housing dilemma is to move in with him.
Alva, meanwhile, has domestic problems of his own. His roommate Braxton, who has never been particularly hardworking and does not reliably pay his portion of their rent, has fallen into even direr financial straits. A vain, fun-loving man who fancies himself a Black Rudolph Valentino (a famous silent-era actor), Braxton was recently cut off financially by his family, who, upon visiting him in Harlem, realized that he was not a first-year student at Columbia like he claimed. Rather than finding work, Braxton sold his most valuable possessions and threw himself full-time into gambling. Not possessing the skill or self-control required to make a living from gambling, Braxton is broke. For a time, he lived off the generosity of a new girlfriend, a woman named Anise who recently moved to Harlem from Virginia. However, Anise was not willing to share Braxton with other women, and when she found out that his philandering had not stopped when their relationship began, she left him. Furious that Braxton was not able to keep a “gold mine” like Anise around, Alva blasts Braxton for his unacceptable behavior, and Braxton moves out.
Although Emma Lou sees Braxton’s exit as the perfect opportunity to move in with Alva herself, he denies her request. He finds her new lodgings and continues to take her out. One evening, at The Lafayette Theater, the two sit through an unusually racist performance. Emma Lou is fed up with the pervasiveness of colorism and, as usual, feels alienated enough to assume that everyone in the audience is secretly laughing at her. This leads to a series of arguments with Alva, during which he claims that Emma Lou feels overly paranoid about color, that most African Americans are not as prejudiced as she thinks they are, and that women like Emma Lou who fixate on skin color and perceived microaggressions become so combative that they make their situations worse. After this outburst, Alva leaves Emma Lou in her room and returns to his own. There, he finds Geraldine asleep in his bed. She tells him that she has just moved to the city, she plans to live with him, and she is pregnant with his child.
Part 4 Analysis
Part 4 further develops Thurman’s illustration of Racism in Black Beauty Standards. Emma Lou and Alva are now a couple, and although their relationship is long-term, the pair spend their time alone rather than with Alva’s group of friends. Alva is outgoing, social, and frequents the many clubs and cabarets in Harlem, but he does so with other women instead of Emma Lou because his friends find Emma Lou’s Blackness unattractive. A vain, superficial man, Alva does not want to be associated with a woman deemed objectionable by his peers. Alva’s sincere interest in Emma Lou is debatable because he and Braxton have explicitly discussed the ease with which Emma Lou gives Alva money, but he is kind to her and helps her navigate Harlem, and the two spend a considerable amount of time together. In spite of their (albeit complicated) closeness, Alva has internalized the relationship between race and beauty deeply enough that he is not willing to openly date a woman with a dark skin tone.
This chapter also continues the novel’s examination of The Hypocrisy of Colorism in Black Communities, primarily through the rent party described in its title. There, Emma Lou meets several individuals whom Thurman has styled, very obviously (especially to readers during the Harlem Renaissance), on living authors, himself included. Cora is Zora Neale Hurston, Tony Crews, the “jazz boy” poet, is Langston Hughes, and Truman is Thurman himself. These three figures were among the most famous associated with the Harlem Renaissance’s third wave, and Hughes and Hurston were the two writers with whom Thurman was the most ideologically aligned. Emma Lou listens to these writers speak directly about colorism. Truman argues that colorism is a by-product of white supremacy and that is so pervasive in Black communities because oppressed groups, in an effort to elevate themselves, often look down upon individuals whom they identify as more marginalized. He argues that repellant as the practice is, within this framework, colorism has its own logic: Black Americans with light skin, themselves often targets of racism, find an even more marginalized group (Black Americans with darker skin) to victimize. Although Truman has just explained why Emma Lou has experienced so much prejudice from her family and peers, she interprets his speech as criticism of her Blackness and fumes silently rather than joining in the conversation. Here, Thurman shows the limits of Emma Lou’s self-reflection, for she is not able to see the validation that has been offered to her for the first time in her life. This should be an “a-ha” moment for Emma Lou, but she instead sees it as the perpetuation of colorism. It is ironic that Thurman would allow his protagonist to reject the novel’s primary philosophical underpinnings, but it speaks to the deep harm that colorism inflicts on individuals: Emma has so much trauma from colorism that she cannot even identify its roots or analyze it.
After the rent party, the group attends a jazz concert, and Thurman further develops the motif. Not only does Emma Lou become entranced by the music, but she also drinks too much alcohol and becomes noticeably drunk. This is a moment where Emma Lou does (to a degree) buy into The Politics of Black Respectability because she perceives her behavior as inappropriate, but she is not able to stop herself from drinking and dancing. She comes home so late and in such an obviously intoxicated condition that she is evicted. Here, Thurman illustrates the tension between respectability and identity formation for modern Black Americans. Jazz, as a new form of music, is emblematic of the way Black Americans forged new kinds of identities during the Harlem Renaissance. Because of the hegemonic power of the Uplift movement, Black Americans had to contend with respectability politics as they embodied new forms of selfhood. Emma Lou grapples with respectability throughout the novel. At times, she buys into the idea of the “right kind” of people and distances herself from those whom her family would find deeply unrespectable. However, in her romantic relationships, she seems to reject respectability politics entirely, and she moves from man to man with great ease and no shame. This complex, contradictory identity is what Thurman wanted Black authors to depict in their writing because such figures were often written about by white authors, and he argued that true equality would come when Black-authored writing could be as free as white-authored literature. Emma Lou, like jazz, is an improvisation, a work in progress. She is an imperfect heroine trying to figure out who she is and who she will become.
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