In The Big Sea, Hughes tells us the vogue began with a black musical revue named Shuffle Along, written by the great Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. The wattage of talent in the show could have illuminated Seventh Avenue—Harlem’s main drag—to eye-popping brilliance. Even Josephine Baker, who later went on to worldwide fame, only made the chorus. The black and white audiences who packed the theater every night were spellbound. Hughes himself was rapt.
Who would have thought, a hundred years before, that such a thing would happen in Harlem? Haarlem, established by the Dutch, raided by the Indians, had for years been a community of farming estates. It slowly lost its luster and declined into a poor region of Irish squatters. With the construction of the elevated railway in the 1880’s, it briefly became home to 150,000 Eastern European Jews, whose dream of settling there was denied. They weren’t welcomed, and by the 1920’s only a few of them seemed to remain, often in resented occupations like landlord and pawn broker. In fact, Hughes titled his second book of poems, Fine Clothes To The Jew, from a poem he wrote about a struggling man who often had to pawn his clothes. (Then he wondered in The Big Sea why his publisher, Knopf, had let him use such an ill-advised title.) After the Jews came the Italians, the Irish and the Finns. But during World War I, the city recruited in the South for factory jobs that paid far more than cotton picking, and African American laborers came in droves. The Great Migration, as it was called, sent white residents fleeing and utterly changed the character of the neighborhoods.
