57 pages • 1 hour read
The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3 Summary: “Alva”
This section introduces two new characters, roommates Alva and Braxton. The men live in a state of disorganized semi-squalor, and their apartment is littered with liquor bottles, empty glasses, and other evidence of a wild night. Although both are employed, they regularly struggle to pay their rent. Alva, the son of a woman with a diverse racial background and a Filipino father, works as a presser in a costume house. He is short but has broad shoulders and is fair-skinned.
Emma Lou, having failed to find secretarial work, is now a personal maid to Arline Strange, a white actress playing the diverse racial role of Carmen in a local production set in Harlem. Arline’s brother is in town to see her performance, and she wants Emma Lou to show him around Harlem. She is astounded that Emma Lou has not been to any of the famed neighborhood cabarets, and Emma Lou privately reflects on the “stupidity” of white people who do not realize that venues such as the Cotton Club allow Black performers but not Black patrons. While watching Arline and the other white performers play the roles of Black characters, Emma Lou scans the audience and sees genuine interest in the performance that, although a “vulgar caricature,” does tell a story about the Black experience in America.
Emma Lou accompanies Arline and her brother to Small’s Paradise, a local cabaret that Emma Lou notices is mostly full of white people. Although initially uncomfortable, Emma Lou becomes mesmerized by the Black performers. This is her first visit to a cabaret and, presumably, her first introduction to the kind of jazz that Harlem Renaissance-era musicians popularized. Emma Lou can tell that Arline’s brother is unsure whether it would be appropriate for him to ask a Black woman to dance, so she suggests that he dance with his sister. While the two are on the dance floor, Emma Lou notices a table full of Black men. One of them comes over, taps Emma Lou on the shoulder, and asks for a dance. It is Alva. She is struck by his skin, “neither brown nor yellow in color” (53), and agrees. She is entranced both by the feel of her dance partner’s body on the dance floor and the syncopated rhythm of the jazz that they are dancing to, and even after the dance ends, she finds herself enraptured. Shortly after she returns to the table, Arline’s brother decides that it is time for the trio to leave. Looking back at the table of Black men where her dance partner sits, she notices that they are looking at her and laughing “cruelly.”
The next morning, Alva oversleeps and is woken up by Braxton, who is only just returning to their apartment after spending a night with a woman he picked up at the cabaret. The two discuss the events of the previous evening, and Braxton comments on Alva’s choice to ask a woman (Emma Lou) with darker skin to dance. Braxton fully embraces colorism and tells Alva that he is not interested in women who are darker than he is. With a light complexion and curly-hair, Braxton’s grandfather was Iroquois, and he is proud both of his heritage and his light complexion. Alva replies that he isn’t bothered by Emma Lou’s Blackness, and he asked her to dance in part because he thought that no one else would.
Emma Lou finds life in Harlem lonely. She has few contacts and no true friends, and although there are other women in her apartment building with whom she is friendly, their acquaintanceship does not blossom into full-fledged friendship. She makes good money working for Arline, but there is a gulf between Emma Lou and the performers. She enquires about joining the cast in a minor role but is turned down. The stage director tells Emma Lou that all of the performers have to be of the same complexion in order to make Arline look good. Emma Lou understands that this isn’t exactly true; there are men with darker skin in the cast, and although the women’s skin colors vary, they are all light. After this rejection, Emma Lou feels even more alienated from the cast members. Finding herself without true friendship at work or home, she resolves to use her newfound financial security to find better accommodations.
Emma Lou has difficulty finding a more suitable home. Many of the apartments she finds are too expensive, some are too dirty, and most are too small. One promising building is run by a woman whose overly familiar demeanor makes Emma Lou uncomfortable, and although she leaves a deposit with the woman to appease her, she quickly moves on and does not return. She is turned away at one house, presumably because of her dark skin, and she plunges into a state of despair, fretting about being born both female and with a dark skin tone.
Lonely, she wanders the streets of Harlem. Preoccupied with finding a new romantic partner, she searches the streets for Alva, the man with whom she danced at Small’s Paradise. She tries to bleach her skin to appeal to the kind of men that she is attracted to. Although she sees many such men congregated on street corners, well dressed and jovial, she is too insecure to approach any of them. One afternoon, she ducks into a theater, more out of loneliness than a desire to see a film. A man sits next to her and brushes his leg against hers. They have a brief liaison, and he asks her for money. She acquiesces, and he tells her that he will meet her again. He does not show up, so Emma Lou looks for him at the Renaissance Casino, a cabaret he said that he frequents. Although she does not find him, she does dance with several men, and eventually, she sees Alva. He does not initially recognize her, although he agrees to dance with her when she asks. His friends, however, do remember Emma Lou from Small’s Paradise and ridicule him for his interest in a woman with a darker skin tone. He maintains that her skin color does not bother him and even tells Braxton “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice” (66). Braxton balks at this saying and argues that the only thing women with dark skin are good for is money.
Part 3 Analysis
Part 3 develops the novel’s most prominent male characters, roommates Alva and Braxton. Both are archetypal, modern Harlemites. They are stylish ladies men who, only intermittently employed, spend much of their days gathered on street corners and their nights drinking and dancing in the neighborhood bars and cabarets. Alva’s complexity is on display in this section of the novel; although a member of a social set comprised of people with light skin tones, he is not averse to the company of women with dark skin and does not (at least initially) appear to embody as much colorism as Braxton.
Alva utters the novel’s titular lines, an old Black American folk adage that extolls the value of women who have dark skin tones. Knowing what the reader does about Alva though, this utterance should be read skeptically, for Alva’s interest in Emma Lou is not pure of heart. His relationship with colorism is troubled. He is more willing than other men to date women with darker skin tones, but he is worried enough about his friends’ assessments of Emma Lou to shy away from being seen with her in public. He cannot, thus, in this instant be seen as a reliable narrator. He may mean to sidestep a serious conversation through the inclusion of what could be interpreted as a raunchy adage. Applied in a more general way to the novel itself, Thurman does seem to use the title to argue against colorism. Characters whose skin tone is dark like Emma Lou and Hazel have true goodness in their hearts. Emma Lou herself points out Hazel’s kindness and generosity, and Emma Lou later reveals her own caring nature in her relationship with Alva’s child. Many of the novel’s characters who have a light complexion are ultimately revealed to be morally lacking, uninteresting, and prejudiced, and so the title asks readers to look beyond the colorism that so permeates society, and understand that dark skin ultimately has little bearing on character.
Braxton, by contrast, fully embraces the false notion that light skin is superior and upbraids Alva for his interest in Emma Lou on multiple occasions. At the end of the chapter, Braxton informs Alva that women with darker skin are only good for their money, and this statement foreshadows the rest of the novel’s action: Alva will come to use Emma Lou for financial support, and Emma Lou will fully embrace her own self-worth only when she leaves him. In this way, the characterizations of Alva and Braxton are central to not only the novel’s thematic structure but also its narrative arc.
Emma Lou’s new job as a “lady’s maid” to actress Arline Strange is significant in multiple ways. It allows Thurman to depict a broader cultural trend within the Harlem Renaissance: a newfound interest in narratives featuring Black characters. While observing the audience at one of Arline’s productions, Emma Lou realizes that the people there have a genuine desire to learn more about African American life. However, Arline’s production, like so many of that era, is steeped in stereotypes and is unrealistic. Thurman’s representation of Arline’s show illustrates the way that many Harlem Renaissance-era white audiences were more interested in representations of downtrodden and working-poor characters than they were in depictions of the Black middle class. Arline’s production of Carmen features a character of Black and white ancestry who has an affair with a wealthy white man and dies tragically, a common trope within both 19th- and early 20th-century narratives that featured Black characters.
Emma Lou’s work with Arline also introduces her to jazz, and its hypnotic impact on her is an oft-repeated trope in the later sections of The Blacker the Berry. Jazz, as a new Black cultural product, functions as an emblem of possibility for African Americans, and it is while listening and dancing to jazz that Emma Lou first meets Alva. She is entranced by their encounter and spends much of the following weeks hoping to run into him on the street or in a cabaret. Jazz has a transformative effect on Emma Lou, and through its use as a trope, Thurman suggests the power of Black art to shape African American identity during the “New Negro” era. Jazz would have been immediately recognizable as a key part of Black culture to readers of this time, and Thurman uses it not only to suggest new possibilities but to showcase the previously ignored talents of Black America. Jazz was one of the most popular styles of music of its era and remains one of America’s most important contributions to world music. By placing jazz at the forefront of his narrative, Thurman situates The Blacker the Berry firmly within the “New Negro” tradition and establishes himself as a writer in dialogue with forms of Black cultural production outside of literature.
These jazz-tinged meetings with Alva, however, also remind Emma Lou of the inherent Racism in Black Beauty Standards because Braxton, as well as other members of their social group, repeatedly reference Emma’s dark skin and use hurtful epithets to describe her perceived lack of conventional beauty. Emma Lou is very aware of this criticism, both because she observes these men laughing at her from afar and because she can hear some of their insults. The shame she feels about her skin color propels her toward other unworthy men, and she has one liaison with a man she meets in a movie theater who asks her for money before jilting her. Through these experiences, Thurman illustrates the tremendous amount of harm that colorism and racist beauty standards do to Emma Lou and Black women more broadly. She becomes fixated on her appearance and is sure that she will not, as a woman with a dark skin tone, be able to find real love.
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