According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., if there was a Harlem Renaissance, “as surely as it was gay as it was black,” it was also disabled. Steeped in a nascent black disability culture characterized by a rejection of eugenics, medical segregation, and the ableist politics of racial respectability, writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston used their writings to recount their experiences of racist medical abuse.
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In his 1944 essay Chicago DefenderIn “On Human Loneliness,” Langston Hughes considers the isolation of waiting spaces such as prison cells, dentist’s offices, and doctor’s offices. He writes, “A doctor’s office is even more lonely, even though it is crowded with people. Each person has his own illness, or his own fear of illness.” Medical segregation in the Jim Crow era is the eponymous background of “On Human Loneliness”, which highlights the isolation of unjust care systems from Hughes’s waiting rooms to the present day. By the time Hughes was writing about these medical scenes of waiting in 1944, he had accumulated considerable experience of illness and deferred medical care.
The economic and social precarity created by the artistic patronage system—specifically, in this case, Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s relationship with their white patron Charlotte Osgood Mason—directly led both writers to experience medical malpractice and extortion. Mason withdrew financial support from Hughes and Hurston in the early 1930s as retaliation for their perceived neglect of his influence. As Hughes wrote big ocean (1940), “She had the power to control people’s lives – she could raise and lower them when and where she pleased.” Hughes’ mental distress at losing Mason’s friendship and support caused his restless stomach to churn constantly and his appetite to disappear. He wrote of the physical and mental effects of his meeting with Mason, “I felt as if I was going to die.” Hughes described Mason as “authoritarian,” “terrible” and severely controlling both the subject matter and the volume of his literary output. Hughes was disappointed to find that her decision to no longer ask Mason for money did not enrich the friendship, as she had hoped, but rather ended it altogether: “I thought she liked me, my patron. But I think she only liked my writing, and now not even that.”
Through literature, film, personal accounts, and photojournalism, black writers like Hurston and Hughes recorded the deep frustrations of modernity and progress for vulnerable citizens living under Jim Crow.
The same day that Mason ended their friendship, Hughes attended a dinner party and was forced to seek medical attention for his troubled stomach and mind when “the world started going away.” Hughes’ primary care physician recommended he be referred to a group of white specialists, who “took samples of my blood, my urine, my spit and whatever else I had to take, charged me a high fee – in advance – and told my doctor a week later that I had a Japanese tapeworm.” Having already incurred several high fees and seen six doctors to treat his ailing body, Hughes was “led into a large room where the doctor was lying on a sofa in an old dressing gown”. Instead of examining and offering a diagnosis and treatment plan, the doctor took one look at Hughes from his couch and “barked down, ‘You don’t have any Japanese tapeworm.’ Hughes was charged a hefty ten dollars (about two hundred dollars in the early 1930s) for one look at this disheveled white doctor.
Waiting for a diagnosis that never came and wasting money from a dizzying sequence of medical neglect and malpractice, Hughes could no longer afford a safe place to rest. Out of options, he returned to Cleveland to recuperate in the small house of his mother and stepfather, where “very kindly my mother gave me the only bed and they slept at Davenport.” A decade after remembering these disturbing events big oceanHughes wrote one of the most resonant expressions of the violence of waiting, “A Dream Deferred,” which transformed the passive non-agency of waiting into a dream that could “sore” and “swell” or “explode” like a wound in the face of the endless postponement of justice. In other words, the experience of his chronic illness had a profound impact on Hughes’s literary output.
Zora Neale Hurston suffered similar medical abuse during a visit to an expensive white-owned medical practice. his 1944 negro digest The essay, “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience”, exemplifies the dilemma of the impact of racism on black health in the twentieth century. In 1931, on Mason’s unwitting recommendation, Hurston saw a doctor in Brooklyn for intestinal trouble, recalling that “(the office’s) reception room was exceedingly magnificent with a magnificent hammered copper door” and “the receptionist was clearly embarrassed when I arrived.” Both the receptionist and the doctor immediately separated her and placed her in a dirty linen closet instead of an examining room.
Despite the Jim Crow symptoms, Hurston stayed put during the doctor’s rigorous examination: “He made a few movements, put a tube down my throat to drain some bile from my gall bladder… Being the kind of objective person I am, I didn’t get up and storm out in anger as I had before. I just waited to see what would happen, and to torture him further.” During this icy observation, Hurston decided to cause her tormentors as much inconvenience as possible by remaining in office as a form of passive resistance. In the end, the doctor charged him twenty dollars for this quick and unpleasant visit. In response, she “got up, put my hat on at a careless angle and walked out saying I would send her a check, which I never did.”
By studying the literature of the Harlem Renaissance through the lens of disability…we can encounter the myriad black disabled and ill lives that contributed profoundly to the creation of modern disability rights.
In Hurston’s non-compliance—refusing to go quietly, or pay the outrageous fee—we can see the intertwined histories of literature, racial resistance, and a growing sense of disability justice. Hurston wrote that she left office “realizing the wretchedness of Anglo-Saxon civilization”, deeply skeptical of medical modernity and white “civilization”, and alleging the sheer unsustainability of white supremacy exemplified by medical segregation.
Through literature, film, personal accounts, and photojournalism, black writers such as Hurston and Hughes recorded the deep frustrations of modernity and progress for vulnerable citizens living under Jim Crow, developing a black modern disability consciousness in protest against these shortcomings. I argue that this opposition manifested itself in two major ways. The first emerged through the proliferation of black-written narratives focused on black people with disabilities. The second emerged through vigorous critiques of how whiteness during this era included some disabled people within its ideological ambit, while white disability advocates adopted discourses of white supremacy and excluded disabled people of color to further their agenda. In short, the white disabled subject often gained popularity as a form of modern subjectivity and identity at the expense of black disabled people.
The erasure of disability and health-based opposition by Black Americans then and now contributes to current inequities around racial health disparities. In black creep modernBlack thinkers such as Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Pauli Murray, Chester Himes, and Zora Neale Hurston confront structural racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia, as well as illness and disability. However, none of these writers have been recognized as essential generators of disability cultural production due to the lack of intersectional inquiry into their lives and works, as well as what Christopher Bell famously coined “white disability studies”.
By studying the literature of the Harlem Renaissance through the lens of disability, and by highlighting the ways in which artists, writers, and activists contested respectable disability’s relationship with whiteness and masculinity, we can confront the myriad black disabled and ill lives that contributed profoundly to the creation of modern disability rights and disability justice movements.
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Black Crip Modern: Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness By Jesse Wagner Available from NYU Press.
