From Renaissance to Rebirth: Author Dorothy West By David Streitfeld Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, August 20, 1998

Jacket cover for Dorothy West's novel "The Wedding."

West, who died Sunday night in Boston, was a mere 88 then, and any mention of her was inevitably prefaced by the phrase "the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance," the country's first flowering of African American arts and letters.

She got the full treatment: celebration in countless profiles, rave reviews, bestsellerdom, a PBS documentary, an Oprah Winfrey movie. Hillary Rodham Clinton labeled her "a national treasure."

All that happened because West was so different from her colleagues in that long-ago writers' circle. Many of their careers were brief, because of racism or self-induced troubles or some combination. Many of their lives were short, too.

West, who must have been one of the last people to be the child of a former slave, never got lost in bitterness or despair. After the Depression ended the Renaissance and its dream of a transformation in racial relations, she began the magazine Challenge, whose very title symbolized that she hadn't lost faith.

In the 1940s, after both Challenge and then New Challenge had failed, she concentrated on her own work. "I have no ability nor desire to be other than a writer, though the fact is I whistle beautifully," she once wrote.

For such a long career, not much got published. After that impressive debut – "The Typewriter" was included in "The Best Short Stories of 1926" – it took her more than 20 years to publish her first novel, "The Living Is Easy," and nearly another 50 for a second, "The Wedding."

In their usual blunt way, journalists would ask: What took you so long?

"I wrote another book," West would answer, "but no one would buy it."

The 1990s have seen black writers become popular and prominent to an extent that would astonish a member of the Harlem Renaissance. West served as a useful reminder that it wasn't always that way, that until recently it was nearly impossible to have a sustained career as a black writer. The audience wasn't there, which meant the publishers weren't there, which meant the audience had no chance of ever being there.

West might never have become a writer at all if her aunt hadn't subscribed to the Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. "I remember my mother saying, 'Why did you bring that magazine in where these children can see it, and learn about the lynchings and all these things?' " she told me. "But if it hadn't been for my aunt bringing that magazine in, do you understand what would have happened?"

I knew: We wouldn't be talking.

West's conversations often proceeded like that, a point followed by a question that underlined the point. But this didn't mean she took her role in history too seriously.

"The Harlem Renaissance?" she scoffed. "We never even heard the words. We were all single, we were all young – the oldest was 30, which seems terribly young to me now. We were all on our own."

West wasn't quite a full-fledged participant; she was more like a mascot. Langston Hughes fondly called her "the kid." She didn't talk, but sat on the floor and listened. Countee Cullen proposed marriage, although the story gets rather less romantic when you learn he did this because his father thought it would cure his homosexuality. West was there on the day in 1934 when Wallace Thurman, under doctor's orders not to drink, gave a big boozy party and then hemorrhaged to death.

She made the Renaissance sound the way a movement should: unself-conscious, productive, often fun. "The intermittent periods of unemployment did not matter, for that was the great sponge era; you ate at anyone's mealtime, and conveniently got too tight to go home at your host's bedtime," she wrote in an essay.

"There were other means of survival. Downtown whites were more than generous. You opened your hand; it closed over a five spot. Or you invited a crowd of people to your studio, charged them admission, got your bootlegger to trust you for a gallon or two of gin, sold it at 15 cents a paper cup, and cleared enough from the evening's proceedings to pay your back rent and your bootlegger. There was usually sufficient money left to lay in a week's supply of liquor and some crackers and sardines."

Sardines, crackers and bathtub gin – with that diet, it's a wonder West didn't die at 32, like Thurman. Part of the reason she didn't, I'd guess, was that she fled New York for Martha's Vineyard, where she had summered as a child.

Starting in the mid-'40s, she lived there full time. This was where the interviewers and the admirers came: to a small house near the edge of Oak Bluffs, the longtime center of black life on the island.

It was a cottage, really, and probably not designed for year-round habitation. Papers and boxes of material were strewn everywhere. West was physically spry but probably past the age at which she should have been grilled about events 70 years before. Her mind would wander.

She was emphatic, however, on the subject of race, and the moral of "The Wedding": "Color was a false distinction; love was not." That helped make the novel a bestseller, but the West works I liked best were her essays, collected in "The Richer, the Poorer." Her writing had a charm that made it look effortless, which is the hardest kind of writing of all.

In one sketch, she reminisced about how her mother dressed her and her cousins – all of them varying skin tones – alike, to underscore their different hues.

"We were always stared at," West wrote. "Whenever we went outside the neighborhood that knew us, we were inspected like specimens under glass. My mother prepared us. As she marched us down out front stairs, she would say what our smiles were on tiptoe to hear, 'Come on, children, let's go out and drive the white folks crazy.'

"She said it without rancor, and she said it in that outrageous way to make us laugh. She was easing our entry into a world that outranked and outnumbered us. If she could not help us see ourselves with the humor, however wry, that gives the heart its grace, she would never have forgiven herself for letting our spirits be crushed before we had learned to sheathe them with pride."

West's spirit never faltered. Her self-respect and pride enabled her to survive numerous lean years before she was rediscovered, a time when she worked as a restaurant cashier and was known to none. Her mother succeeded.