When Washington Was in Vogue

When Washington Was in Vogue

By Edward Christopher Williams (285 pages)

Published by Amistad

Bookish rating: 3.5

When Washington Was in Vogue is one of those tricky books to review, because it has a lot of value but turned out to be a bit of a chore to get through.

The book is “a lost novel of the Harlem Renaissance,” which means it was found as published in The Messenger from January 1925 through June 1926, as an English PhD student, Adam McKible, was doing research for his dissertation. Certainly, there is a special “discovery” element that, frankly, is so often absent from literary research. I mean, it’s hard to compare with discovering new fossils, miracle drugs, or planets, such as in the sciences.

So when English nerds discover something, it’s pretty exciting.

The novel is a simple love story, told through letters via Davy Carr’s narration. Well read, well educated, and quite contemplative, Davy has an opinion on pretty much everything. As a piece of historical writing, this is useful for revealing some fascinating nuances, habits, fashions, manners, and dynamics of Washington, DC, and the DC “Black Bourgeoisie” of the 1920s. Also, as someone pretty familiar with DC, having lived there for awhile, Davy's descriptions of areas almost a century ago were eerily fascinating.

This is, of course, a novel of the Harlem Renaisssance, but Davy’s criticism of racism is surprisingly understated. For example, he writes to his friend Bob, “The downtown theaters here segregate colored people, and some of them will not sell them seats anywhere but in the gallery. Naturally, that lets me out. You will say, of course, that since I can ‘get by,’ such a rule should not bother me. But for some reason difficult to explain, it does” (p. 15). The reason it bugs him seems pretty clear to me!

More interestingly, Davy criticizes how folks—women in particular—who are light-skinned enough to “pass” not only do so (and really, who could blame them?), but leverage it against other Black women. Davy describes a shocking scene in which some light-skinned women who can pass and thus attend certain theatrical events that are absolutely closed to Black people, chat among themselves, asking a dark-skinned woman her opinion of such performances, knowing perfectly well that she cannot attend them. Davy, livid, views what he calls “the color line” among the Black bourgeoisie that places higher  value on lighter skin as “a dreadful confession of admitted interiority” (p. 75).

When Washington Was in Vogue has a lot of charm and tremendous historical value. It is, however, not literarily fantastic or amazing. Descriptions get long-winded and tiresome, and Davy can be a tad stuffy and unlikable at times. Although it’s a nice book, and most definitely an asset to furthering understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, ultimately, from a strictly literary point of view, it’s just a nice little love story.