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LOOK HOMEWARD BABY                       HARRINGTON

become an artist. He was giggling over all of us. At himself. At all the Black bar-flies who giggled and shrieked with him. He was giggling over the image of old George Washington, who wasn't called "the father of his country" for nothing, tip-toeing around the female slave stables with his pants down. He was giggling over the whole god-damned star spangled lie, and at our Black impotence. In the shadow of the hydra-headed monster you giggle or you cry, and cryin' means dyin'. So I got myself together and climbed back up the Cathedral Parkway Hill to the National Academy of Design. 
There was talk then of a Black Renaissance but in muted tones. This was quite fitting because rigor mortis had already set in. During the ludicrously brief lifespan of this American phenomenon a small group of Black poets, novelists and artists did manage to eat fairly regular meals. Black success was doled out and manipulated by a running pack of phoney liberal aristocrats along Park Avenue, Sutton Place and other millionaire slums where, until the new fad took root, white-tied sybarites were swinging from the chandeliers out of mind-bending boredom. Dilettante Carl Van Vechten came to the rescue with his discover that black is exciting. The bejeweled creeps had a ball. They vied with each other to show off the newest captive Black talent, whom they posed against a background of Currier and Ives prints. Town houses and apartment palaces jumped, once their flagrantly uniformed doormen had been discreetly instructed to keep cool no matter WHAT came in through the front door. Langston Hughes used to tell an unlikely but delicious tale of watching, in open mouthed wonder, a collection of Black talent dip and pirouette with a bevy of lacquered social register harpies in an elegant minuet. A string quartet played Stephen Foster. The Black Renaissance folded when Charlie and Miss Anne discovered some new playthings. The people of Harlem never noticed the difference. Rats continued to chew on infants in side-street flats and cops continued their target practice on the crowded main drags, contributing to U.S. dominance in the Olympic games through the incredible reserves of speed and stamina developed by their intended Black targets. 
Funeral services for the Black Renaissance were made bearable by Harlem's Black bartenders. They poured a little extra gin into the glasses of the disillusioned, knowing with their special insights that Black Renaissance can come only from Black people, by Black people, and for Black people. And so perhaps with a little extra gin they were only trying to preserve some ex Black

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