Cullen, Countee

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Cullen, Countee

March 30, 1903
January 9, 1946

It has been difficult to place exactly where poet, novelist, and playwright Countee Cullen was born, with whom he spent the very earliest years of his childhood, and where

he spent them. Scholars variously cite New York City and Baltimore as his birthplace, but Cullen himself, on his college transcript at New York University, listed Louisville, Kentucky, as his place of birth. A few years later, when he had achieved considerable literary fame during the era known as the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, he was to assert that his birthplace was New York City, a claim he continued to make for the rest of his life. Both Cullen's second wife, Ida, and some of his closest friends, including Langston Hughes and Harold Jackman, all said he was born in Louisville, although one Cullen scholar, Beulah Reimherr, claims in her M.A. thesis that Ida Cullen gave her husband's place of birth as Baltimore. As James Weldon Johnson wrote in The Book of American Negro Poetry (1931), "There is not much to say about these earlier years of Cullen—unless he himself should say it." And Cullen—revealing a temperament that was not exactly secretive but private, less a matter of modesty than a tendency toward being encoded and tactful—never in his life said anything more clarifying.

What we know for certain is that he was born on March 30, 1903, and that sometime between his birth and 1918 he was adopted by the Rev. Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle (Mitchell) Cullen of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem. It is impossible to state with any degree of certainty how old Cullen was at the time or how long he knew the Cullens before he was adopted. Apparently he went by the name of Countee Porter until 1918. He became Countee P. Cullen by 1921, and eventually just Countee Cullen. According to Harold Jackman, the adoption was never really "official"; that is to say, it was never formally consummated through the proper state-agency channels. It is difficult, indeed, to know whether Cullen was ever legally an orphan at any stage in his childhood.

Frederick Cullen was one of the pioneer black activist-ministers; he moved his Salem Methodist Episcopal Church from a storefront mission—where it was in 1902, when he first arrived in New York City—to the site of a former white church in Harlem in 1924, where he could boast of a membership of over 2,500. Since Countee Cullen himself stated in his 1927 anthology of black American poetry, Caroling Dusk, that he was "reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage," it is clear that his foster father, particularly, was a strong influence. The two men were very close, often traveling abroad together. But as Cullen evidences a decided unease in his poetry over his strong and conservative Christian training and the attraction of his pagan inclinations, his feelings about his father may have been somewhat ambivalent. Frederick Cullen was, on the one hand, a puritanical Christian patriarch, and Countee was never remotely that. On the other hand, it has been suggested that Frederick was also something of an effeminate man. (He was dressed in girl's clothing by his poverty-stricken mother well beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such a practice and was apparently effeminate in his manner as an adult.) Some scholars, especially Jean Wagner, have argued that Countee Cullen's homosexuality, or decidedly ambiguous sexual nature, may have been attributable to his foster father's contrary influence as both fire-breathing Christian and latent or covert transsexual. To be sure, in his poetry Cullen equated paganism with various sensual postures, including homosexuality. Cullen was a devoted and obedient son, and the fact that the Cullens had no other children made this attachment much easier to achieve.

Cullen was an outstanding student both at DeWitt Clinton High School (1918–1921)—where he not only edited the school's newspaper but also assisted in editing the literary magazine, Magpie, and wrote his first poetry that achieved notice—and at New York University (1921–1925), where he wrote most of the major work that was to make up his first two volumes, Color (1925) and Copper Sun (1927). It was also while at NYU that he wrote The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). In high school Cullen won his first contest, a citywide competition, with the poem "I Have a Rendezvous with Life," a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger's "I Have a Rendezvous with Death." If any event signaled the coming of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the precocious success of this rather shy black boy who, more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure. Here was a black man with considerable academic training who could, in effect, write "white" verse—ballads, sonnets, quatrains, and the like—much in the manner of Keats and the British Romantics (albeit, on more than one occasion, tinged with racial concerns), with genuine skill and compelling power. He was certainly not the first African American to attempt to write such verse, but he was first to do so with such extensive education, with such a complete understanding of himself as a poet, and producing poetry that was not trite or inferior. Only two other black American poets before Cullen could be taken so seriously as self-consciously considered and proficient poets: Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

If the aim of the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, the reinvention of the native-born African American as a being who could be assimilated while decidedly retaining something called a "racial self-consciousness," then Cullen fit the bill better than virtually any other Renaissance writer. And if "I Have a Rendezvous with Life" was the opening salvo in the making of Cullen's literary reputation, then the 1924 publication of "Shroud of Color" in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury confirmed the advent of the black boy wonder as one of the most exciting American poets on the scene. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from NYU, Cullen earned a master's degree in English and French from Harvard (1927). Between high school and graduation from Harvard he had become the most popular black poet—virtually the most popular black literary figure—in America. It was after one of his poems and his popular column appeared in Opportunity magazine that A'Lelia Walker (heiress of Madame C. J. Walker's hair-care-products fortune) named her salon, where the black and white literati gathered in the late 1920s, the Dark Tower.

Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s: the first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry Contest in 1925; Poetry magazine's John Reed Memorial Prize; the Amy Spingarn Award of The Crisis magazine; second prize in Opportunity magazine's first poetry contest; second prize in the poetry contest of Palms. He was the second African American to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. His first three books—Color, Copper Sun, and The Ballad of the Brown Girl —sold well and made him a hero for many blacks. Lines from Cullen's popular poems, such as "Heritage," "Incident," "From the Dark Tower," and "Yet Do I Marvel," were commonly quoted.

Cullen was also at the center of one of the major social events of the Harlem Renaissance; on April 9, 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, the only child of W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish weddings in black New York history. This wedding was to symbolize the union of the grand black intellectual patriarch and the new breed of younger African Americans who were responsible for much of the excitement of the Renaissance. It was an apt meshing of personalities, as both Cullen and Du Bois père were conservative by nature and ardent traditionalists. That the marriage turned out so disastrously and ended so quickly—Yolande and Cullen divorced in 1930—probably adversely affected Cullen. (He remarried in 1940.) Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems in 1929, receiving lukewarm reviews from both black and white presses. He was bitterly disappointed that "The Black Christ," his longest and in many respects his most complicated poem, the product of over two years' work, was considered by most critics to be his weakest and least distinguished.

From the 1930s until his death, Cullen wrote a great deal less, partly hampered by his job as a French teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High (his most famous student was James Baldwin). But he wrote noteworthy, even significant work in a number of genres. His novel One Way to Heaven, published in 1934, rates among the better black satires and is one of the three important fictional retrospectives of the Harlem Renaissance, the others being Wallace Thurman's The Infants of the Spring and George Schuyler's Black No More; his translation of The Medea is the first major translation of a classical work by a twentieth-century black American writer; the children's books The Lost Zoo and My Lives and How I Lost Them are among the more clever and engaging books of children's verse, written at a time when there was not much work published for children by black writers; and his poetry of the period includes perhaps some of his best, certainly some of his more darkly complex, sonnets. He was also working on a musical with Arna Bontemps called St. Louis Woman (based on Bontemps's novel, God Sends Sunday ) at the time of his death from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning.

For many years after his death, Cullen's reputation was eclipsed by those of other Harlem Renaissance writers, particularly Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and his work had gone out of print. Later, however, there was a resurgence of interest in his life and work, and his books were reissued.

Bibliography

Bontemps, Arna, ed. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.

Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.

Early, Gerald, ed. My Soul's High Song; The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Ferguson, Blanche F. Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966.

Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Book of American Negro Poetry, 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1931.

Perry, Margaret. A Bio-bibliography of Countée P. Cullen, 1903–1946. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1971.

Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Translated by Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

gerald early (1996)

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History