57 pages • 1 hour read
The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1 Summary: “Emma Lou”
Content Warning: This summary, analysis, and subsequent sections of this guide include discussions of minstrel shows, an offensive form of 19th- and early 20th-century theater that presented racist depictions of African Americans.
The novel opens with the high school graduation ceremony of Emma Lou Morgan, a young African American woman from Boise, Idaho. Emma Lou reflects that she is the only Black face in a sea of white students, and although she is not necessarily unhappy to be African American, she does regret being what she terms “too black.” As a graduating senior, Emma Lou is becoming aware of the politics of race and skin color, and the novel’s opening scene details her burgeoning understanding not only of race in America but also her own racialized position within society. Her skin is darker than the members of her immediate family and also darker than most of the other Black people in her community. Emma Lou’s skin color is a source of shame not only for Emma Lou but her mother and grandmother. During the ceremony, Emma Lou muses that because of her dark skin, her post-graduation options will be limited, and although she is happy to be graduating, she is ultimately unsure how useful her diploma will be.
Emma Lou’s immediate family members all have light complexions, and both her mother and her grandmother fret over Emma Lou’s dark complexion. Although their community is racially homogenous, there is a distinct skin-color hierarchy that gives preference to light complexions. Emma Lou’s family’s light skin is due to a white ancestor, a southern planter who enslaved one of Emma Lou’s great-grandparents. Her grandparents, although born into freedom, left the South for Kansas and then Idaho, wanting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and what had once been “slave” states. Having light skin to begin with, Emma Lou’s grandparents encouraged their children to marry other Black people with light skin tones, hoping that each successive generation would be “whiter and whiter” (7). The roots of this colorism, Emma Lou notes, can be found within her grandmother Maria’s belief that because of her white and Black ancestry, she has the blood of the “only true aristocrats of the United States” in her veins (7). To Maria’s great disappointment, her daughter married Jim Morgan, a man with dark skin whom she thought unworthy of her child. Both Maria and Emma Lou’s mother, Jane, worry that Emma Lou will be unable to find a husband, as women who have darker skin in their community are not only the target of prejudice but are also seen as less marriageable. Emma Lou comes of age against these fraught family dynamics and only feels a true connection to her uncle Joe, the one member of her family who does not judge her for her skin color.
Uncle Joe suggests that Emma Lou attend college at the University of Southern California, where she will be able to obtain a teaching degree and then find work at a school in the South. Joe argues that Los Angeles, where USC is located, is more forward-thinking than Boise, and because it is a big city, there is more racial harmony and less prejudice. Emma Lou is truly excited by this suggestion and enthusiastically agrees to attend the University of Southern California.
Although her ostensible goal at USC is to obtain a teaching degree, Emma Lou is most excited to meet other Black students. Having been the only Black girl in her high school, she yearns for fellow students who look like her, who come from communities like hers, and who will see beyond her dark skin. However, during Emma Lou’s first few interactions with Black students, her own colorism begins to show; she is preoccupied with finding “the right” kind of Black friends. Since childhood, she has been steeped in unspoken rules of race, color, and class, and her politics of friendship are as exclusionary as her mother and grandmother’s. She seeks out the company of respectable Black men and women, individuals whose speech, behavior, and appearance come as close as possible to those of white people. Hazel, a Black girl whom Emma Lou meets while registering for classes, is decidedly not “the right” type of Black person. Hazel is loud, brazen, showy, and seeks attention from her white peers in a manner that Emma Lou describes, repeatedly and pejoratively, as “minstrel-like.”
Emma Lou attempts to forge friendships with more respectable students with little success. She believes that her friendship with Hazel, who is also shunned by the other Black students at USC, marks her as undesirable, and although she tries to become part of the popular Black social circles at USC, she is not sought out by her fellow students, nor does she receive invitations to their parties and events. There is one Black student, a sophomore studying music named Grace Giles, who does develop a friendship with Emma Lou and makes an effort to include her in her friends’ activities. Emma Lou, however, dismisses Grace’s friends because their educational backgrounds and class positions do not match her own. They are not the “right kind” of people.
When Emma Lou returns home to Boise for the summer, she has grown dissatisfied with college life. She is unable to truly immerse herself in her studies because she has had so little social success. She hasn’t become part of the “right” group of people, and as social acceptance was arguably her primary goal in attending college, her experience there feels like failure.
While attending the Sunday School Union picnic, the most important social event in her community, Emma Lou meets a young man named Weldon Taylor. A newcomer to Boise since Emma Lou left, Weldon is trying to earn enough money to re-enter medical school back east. Weldon does not have a light complexion, but Emma Lou is still drawn to him, and the two begin a sexual relationship. Although she judged Hazel harshly for her own lack of respectability, Emma Lou does not meaningfully reflect on her own sexual activity. Emma Lou believes herself to be in love with Weldon and assumes that they will ultimately marry. She is heartbroken to learn that Weldon has decided to become a Pullman porter and plans to leave town. Although Weldon has a history of philandering and treats all women with equal disrespect, Emma Lou believes that she has been rejected because of her dark skin and becomes angry and bitter. Because she sees her future as a series of rejections and forestalled opportunities, she does not want to return to USC in the fall and agrees to do so only reluctantly at her mother’s insistence.
Part 1 Analysis
Part 1 introduces Emma Lou, the story’s protagonist, and begins to illustrate each of the novel’s primary themes. Perhaps the most critical conversation raised in The Blacker the Berry is that of The Hypocrisy of Colorism in Black Communities. Colorism is discrimination against darker skin tones, even within one racial group or community. In the case of The Blacker the Berry, Thurman depicts colorism within Black American communities in Harlem Renaissance-era America. Emma Lou grows up steeped in this climate of colorism, and her very first monologue evidences her preoccupation with her skin color. Although Emma Lou is not dissatisfied with her racial identity, she does wish that her skin more closely resembled the light complexions of her immediate family members. Emma Lou judges herself and others harshly for having dark skin, and although she is a victim of colorist prejudice, she also engages in it. Particularly when she arrives at USC, Thurman foregrounds Emma’s rejection of classmates who have dark skin tones and her desire to make friends only with Black students with light skin. This illustrates the way that Emma Lou has internalized colorism: Rather than disavowing the skin color politics that mark her as undesirable, she embraces and perpetuates them. This phenomenon is most visible in her interactions with Hazel, a classmate with dark skin whom she describes as “clownish” and “minstrel-like.” This is a deeply offensive term and refers to a style of theater popularized during the 19th century, in which (mostly) white performers, often in blackface makeup, acted out damaging and harmful stereotypes of Black Americans. That Emma Lou would describe Hazel using such a word illustrates her own internalized racism. Minstrelsy becomes a motif within the novel, and because Thurman himself was deeply aware of the offensiveness of the minstrel stereotype, its inclusion in The Blacker the Berry is a strong condemnation of colorism.
Related to colorism but important enough to function as its own discrete theme, Racism in Black Beauty Standards also becomes apparent in the first part of The Blacker the Berry. Each culture has its own beauty standards that dictate attractiveness and sexual desirability. Within Black communities of the Harlem Renaissance era, racism manifested in the gendered colorism in beauty standards. While lighter skin was preferable in both men and women, men still had the possibility of being considered attractive with darker skin if they were Educated, powerful, particularly upstanding, or worked in a white-collar profession. This is evident in the novel’s male figures. Emma Lou’s father’s complexion is darker than her mother, and her love interest, Weldon, also darker skin. Women, on the other hand, would often not be considered attractive if their skin was as dark as Emma Lou’s, and this double standard haunts Emma Lou throughout the novel. She also maintains it herself, scrutinizing her female classmates more than she does Weldon. This cultural practice has its roots in patriarchy, where men can play a variety of roles but women are valued primarily for their roles as wife and mother. Emma Lou’s mother and grandmother fear that she will never find a husband because she is so dark. When Emma Lou’s first romantic relationship ends in rejection, she blames her skin color, even though evidence points to Weldon’s own weakness of character and philandering.
Also on display in the first part of this novel are The Politics of Black Respectability, an ideology that would have been familiar to Harlem Renaissance-era readers. The politics of respectability, also known as “Uplift” ideology, was the notion that Black Americans would gain respect and social standing more readily in mainstream white America through a specific kind of assimilation: They were to mimic the morally upstanding, church-going, polite behavior of the white middle class. Respectability politics sought to distance African Americans from the behaviors and cultural practices that white America found distasteful such as alcohol consumption, foul language, slang, “promiscuity,” poor grooming, and flashy clothes. Emma Lou’s mother and grandmother are markedly fixated on respectability politics, and although they passed their colorism on to Emma Lou completely, she absorbed their respectability politics only haphazardly. Uplift was a deeply contentious issue in its day, and although respectability politics was popular, especially within the powerful network of Black churches, it was also reviled as thinly veiled white supremacy by many prominent intellectuals, among them Wallace Thurman. Emma Lou has a fraught relationship with respectability politics, often holding others to standards that she herself ignores. That duplicity is on display in this section of the novel, both through Emma Lou’s casual sexual relationship with Weldon and the way that she responds to Hazel at USC. Emma Lou is not troubled by what her mother would term the “loss” of her virtue, but she is troubled by Hazel’s lack of virtue. Part of Thurman’s literary goal was to create characters who, through their rejection of respectability politics, gained the depth, complicated nature, and humanity of white characters, who were frequently depicted as complex, even problematic individuals. He rejected the notion that in order to gain humanity, Black Americans had to distance themselves from the less desirable aspects of their personalities and lives. He argued the opposite, and Emma Lou evidences his interest in developing complex, round characters.
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