The Blacker the Berry

"Beautiful and hard-working black people come in all shades."

"Yes, he was 32 when he died of an illness, I think it was tuberculosis. Wallace Thurman was a brilliant writer who did not have a chance to really make an impact in the way that his brilliance demanded. He only wrote two books, The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring . Even though Infants of the Spring is the book that deals mostly with Blackness and queerness and the Harlem Renaissance, it’s The Blacker the Berry that had the biggest impact on me as a reader. It’s because although there’s not a lot of talk about the intersection of Blackness and queerness in the book, when he does talk about it, he makes it seem like this is how the Black homosexual has to live: in the shadows, in a closed room, in the closet, suppressing their desires, or even getting into relationships with people who they know they should not be in a relationship with because those are not where their desires are, but that’s where the society is pushing them to go. The Blacker the Berry is the earliest work that I found that even touches on Blackness and queerness. This is 1929, the same time that Zora Neale Hurston is writing and it’s just, ‘Wow! He had the courage to write about this at a time when it was utterly dangerous to do so.’ The courageousness of it is one of the things that makes me return to this book and think about the issues that it brings up. I definitely think that he put a lot of himself in that main character. This is just pop psychology, but I think changing the gender was either his way of expressing his femininity or it was his way of convincing the reader that it was not his experience, so that he wouldn’t be implicated in it. I really wish he would have lived because I would have loved to see what else he could have written because he was such a brilliant writer. He didn’t leave us much, but I hope people discover his works and pay more attention to him."