The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women.

Reviewed by Arlene Elder University of Cincinnati 

Marcy Knopf's The Sleeper Wakes adds another welcome voice to the chorus of rediscovery of early African-American women writers whose multiple perspectives and interests demonstrate the fertility and variety of the "gardens" nourishing their contemporary daughters and sons. Gloria Hull's Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987) and Maureen Honey's Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (1989), the text Knopf acknowledges as a model for her own, are two examples of such literary archeology - as is, of course, the recent multi-volume Schomburg Library reprints of nineteenth-century Black women's writing. For the most part, the stories Knopf collects here previously existed for us only on microfilm, although many of them were readily accessible in popular African-American magazines like Opportunity, Forum, and The Crisis during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of these tales, such as Dunbar-Nelson's "His Great Career" and "Summer Session," were never published; others appeared in little-known journals such as Stylus, Young's Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Quill and quickly disappeared. As Nellie McKay notes in her Foreword, unlike the works of their male counterparts, the stories of most of the women writers of this artistically prolific period were never reprinted.

As the reader would expect, many of the stories in this collection add to and enrich our understanding of the oppressive racial experiences of African-American women throughout our history, and Knopf, wisely, has chosen many tales that offer realistic rather than traditionally "literary" depictions of Black women's struggles against Euro-American hegemony. Moreover, even when the literary and historical terrain appears familiar, these women writing about their own lives and histories provide realistic twists on the expected. The title story, Jessie Redmon Fauset's "The Sleeper Wakes," for instance, provides a neat subversion of the popular "tragic octoroon" tale by painting a heroine who embraces her newly discovered Black heritage rather than following the well-trod, fictional path to drown herself in a swamp or throw herself off a cliff. Moreover, taken as a whole, these writers are not fixated on racism but also explore the difficulties women have faced with the narrow-mindedness and acquired prejudices within their own Black communities. Fauset's "Double Trouble," for example, is not really about race at all, but examines the discrimination and cruelty directed against even the children of those who violate social norms. The debilitating dependence of women on marriage is also a strong sub-theme in this work.

More surprising than the stories' intraracial focus, however, a concern that found its expression in frequently published writers like Wallace Thurman and Charles Chesnutt, as well, is the unexpected appearance of so many male protagonists in these tales. As Knopf speculates, a male voice would have provided these writers with a wider audience than would otherwise have been the case - a readership used to the narratives of men's experiences by artists like Langston Hughes and other well-known male figures of the period. "The Typewriter" by Dorothy West presents such a hero, as does Gwendolyn Bennett's "Wedding Day," which also features the European setting so popular among white fiction writers of the Jazz Age and frequented in the work of Harlem Renaissance figures like Claude McKay. "Freedom," by Nella Larsen, offers a male twist on the well-worn convention of a woman obsessed by a lost love.

It should be mentioned, too, that from its lush cover, featuring a reproduction of Harlem Rennaisance Party by artist Faith Ringgold, to the elegantly designed first pages of the collected stories, The Sleeper Wakes is a beautifully produced book. While Knopf's anthology offers a valuable selection of little-known stories by relatively well-known figures like Bennett, Johnson, Fauset, Hurston, Dunbar-Nelson, Bonner, West, and Larsen, it is equally useful in introducing contemporary readers to lesser-known, even unknown, fiction writers like Leila Amos Pendleton, Anita Scott Coleman, Ottie Beatrice Graham, Eloise Bibb Thompson, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Maude Irwin Owens. The inclusion of these figures gives us another excellent contribution to the increasingly detailed literary landscape of African-American women.