PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: A new book is a reader's delight for the who's who it features in its pages. "Harlem Rhapsody" is a novel that serves as a love letter to the heart of Black creativity and possibility in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance. And at the center of that love letter is a love story - the hidden relationship between Black activist W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Redmon Fauset, writer and literary editor of the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis. Victoria Christopher Murray brings all of this to life in her new novel, and she joins me now. Welcome.
VICTORIA CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
HUANG: So let's start with Jessie Redmon Fauset. When did you first come across her writing, and when did you decide that she had the potential for her own star turn in historical fiction?
MURRAY: I really kind of took this methodically. I wanted to write about a woman and a woman that I'd want to spend the next two years with.
HUANG: Right.
MURRAY: And I thought about, where would I want this woman to live? I thought about New York. I thought about the time period, and that got me to the Harlem Renaissance. It wasn't until I started digging in, looking for the women of the Harlem Renaissance that I became committed to this, because I couldn't find any. Every time you looked up - and I was just doing surface research at the time - it was always about the men. And it was Langston Hughes, when he was saying, she was the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance that I found Jessie Redmon Fauset.
HUANG: Yeah. The book basically opens as she's about to start her new job as literary editor at The Crisis, which was a job created for her by W. E. B. Du Bois. Tell us about their relationship as the book starts.
MURRAY: Yes. So it's really interesting because I never meant to write anything salacious. I never meant to write a controversial novel, but I will always tell the truth. And Du Bois was the editor of The Crisis magazine. He was the founder and the editor. And when he started thinking about maybe perhaps expanding the magazine, that's when he called upon Jessie Redmon Fauset.
Now, he'd known her for over a decade at that point. She was the first Black woman to graduate from Cornell University, the first Black woman to graduate Phi Beta Kappa. And he knew her because he was acting as a mentor to her. They had kind of, I guess, what we call today, a pen pal kind of relationship. And they met many years later, in 1914, and they were both smitten with each other and began a more intimate relationship.
HUANG: I feel like the emotional core of a lot of the novel is this relationship between Fauset and Du Bois. And, like, what does sort of looking at his infidelities and her relationship with him, what kind of insight does that give the reader into his life and Fauset's life and the world around them?
MURRAY: Well, you know, there's a question to be asked. Like, would the Harlem Renaissance have happened without their affair? It's really interesting because I had considered writing the book without their affair. I said, let me see if I could do that, because I really wanted it focused on this woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance. But none of it could have happened without their affair. Their affair was the reason that he brought her to New York. Their affair was the reason he encouraged her in certain ways. Their affair was the reason that she even finished her own first novel. And so I felt that I had to write the book with the affair to tell the complete story, but to tell them as complete people. They were these two extraordinary people who were doing something very ordinary.
HUANG: Reading this historical fiction was so fun because it just felt like, you know, who's going to appear next? There was Langston Hughes. There was Claude McKay. There was Nella Larsen. There are so many more. And it's just this revolving door of Black writers, because Fauset was so key in bringing them to prominence. As you mentioned earlier, people even called her one of the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance. Can you describe some of these relationships between Jessie and the writers that she worked with?
MURRAY: Not only did Jessie discover all of these writers, not only did she edit them, but she mentored them. Countee Cullen was about 16. Langston Hughes was 17 when he first reached out to her. Nella Larsen had just gotten married. Gwendolyn Bennett was in college when she met Jessie. And I could go on. The list goes on and on and on.
Like, Langston Hughes came to New York wanting to be a writer, but he was at Columbia University in their engineering program because that was the only way his father would pay for it. And Jessie was really instrumental in his life in helping guide him through the racism that he experienced at Columbia. And it was that way with all the authors. They had different issues in their life, but she was always there to help them, guide them through the next step.
HUANG: Let's get a taste of that literary world that Fauset helped create. Here is a clip of Langston Hughes reading one of his early poems, "The Negro Speaks Of Rivers."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LANGSTON HUGHES: (Reading) I've known rivers. I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo, and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers - ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
HUANG: How much of a poetry buff were you before diving into this book?
MURRAY: That's a very good question. I can't say that I was a poetry buff at all, but I became one afterwards because these poets told such complete stories in four or five, six lines. I need 400 pages to tell a story. And I was just amazed because I had to study their words. And I also wanted to study the timing of this. Like, for example, this poem was the very first poem that he wrote that was put into The Crisis magazine. They didn't do this on purpose, but it came out at the same time as the Tulsa riots. And so that was just such an interesting situation where he was talking about his soul is as deep as the rivers and what was going on in Tulsa at the time. And people were going to read his poem as they were also reading about the riots.
HUANG: Yeah, for sure. One of the things that I loved from reading the notes in the back of your book is that you said that you've read every issue of The Crisis from 1919 to 1925 to get the language of the times right.
MURRAY: Yes.
HUANG: What did you find, and what did you use in the novel from that?
MURRAY: Oh, I mean, everything. I also wanted to read it because those were the issues that - Jessie was the editor, and I used all of their language. They were also very formal. You know, they didn't think about things. They pondered things. My friend said after they started reading this book, they were flabbergasted all the time and those kind of...
HUANG: (Laughter).
MURRAY: They had to sit back and ponder a few things themselves. So I really wanted people to be drawn back into 1920. That was very important to me. I wanted people to feel like they were in Harlem. I wanted people to feel like they were really listening to these people, speaking to these people.
HUANG: That's Victoria Christopher Murray. Her new novel is "Harlem Rhapsody." Thank you so much.
MURRAY: Thank you so much for this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HARLEM ON MY MIND")
ETHEL WATERS: (Singing) I've got Harlem on my mind. And I'm longing to be low down. And my... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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