Stephen_Murray's Full Review: The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudol...
Rudolph Fisher, M.D. (1897-1934) was one of the best Harlem Renaissance prose writers. His first novel The Walls of Jericho (1928) is the best novel of jazz-age Harlem. Along with his 1932 detective novel The Conjure Man Dies (and a posthumously published case included in The City of Refuge, Fisher prefigured the Gravedigger/Coffin Eddy series of Harlem policiers of Chester Himes. Walter Mosley has honored Fisher as a forerunner of his work, and I'd guess that naming the hero of Mosley's series of LA novels Ezekiel is an homage to Fisher, three of whose stories have protagonists named Ezekiel.
More like Himes than like Mosley, Fisher wrote about intraracial antagonism, that is, black people (OK, almost always male ones) preying on black people and denigrating each other—sometimes with good cause, sometimes without. Fisher's fiction generally focused on antagonisms based on differences in coloration ("high yaller" vs. "black as an eight-ball"), class ("dicty" vs. "rat"), origin (those born in northern cities vs. northward migrants from the US South and the Caribbean islands), and generation (with the fervent churchgoing elders having reached adulthood in the South and being dismayed by youth "gone crazy over gittin", i.e., materialism).
The Harlem Renaissance writers had not been born in Harlem, but with the notable exception of Zora Neale Hurston (and Claude McKay, if he is included as a Harlem Renaissance writer) were mostly urban in background. Fisher was born in Washington D.C., grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and earned a bachelor's and a master's degree there, at Brown University, before going back to D. C. for medical school at Howard University. After graduating with highest honors in 1924, he received a National Research Council fellowship to do research at Columbia University on the effects on viruses of radiation. He had been writing short stories in the Library of Congress, and had four published in 1925, two in The Atlantic Monthly. The most race conscious of his stories, "High Yaller" was published in The Crisis (edited by W. E. B. Du Bois) and won a (cash) award from a committee of judges that included soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis and H. G. Welles. All of which is to say that did not have an apprenticeship of publishing in obscure little literary magazines.
The 1987 collection of Fisher's published stories edited and introduced by John McCluskey, Jr. presents them in topical rather than chronological order, but begins with three of the 1925 stories. The title story, Fisher's first publication) was already very sure-handed. Over the decade of Fisher's dual careers in medicine and literature, there is no obvious growth in craftsmanship, or any need for one. The main difference is a shift away from focusing on immigrants from the rural south being discombobulated and fleeced by cynical already established Harlemites to conflicts based on class (with color prejudice within the African American population popping up recurrently).
The prize-winning 1925 story, "The South lingers on" is the sketchiest with five vignettes of transplanted southern blacks finding the northern "promised land" a not very friendly place. And seeming proffers of friendship could not always be trusted, as King Solomon Gillis discovers as his guilelessness is exploited as soon as a train disgorged him in Penn Station ("City of Refuge"). As McCluskey notes, "many of the ingredients common to Fisher's stories are provided in this first published piece," including a displaced and disoriented character, knowing others eager to exploit the new "brother," invocation of music (sacred or secular depending on the story), and swift violence. "Ringtail" adds another frequent ingredient: revenge. In "Ringtail" it is a "West Indian" (specifically, Trinidadian) who is victimized and finds a way to strike back.
The defenses/ vengeances in other stories are wittier and more proportional to provocation (Ezekiel Learns, Guardians of the Law, Blades of Steel, Backslider, Common Meters, Fire by Night, Dust; the exception occurs in "The Promised Land").
The high hopes of journeying north to freedom and the slippery wolf-filled byways of Harlem were Fisher's subject matter. Although Fisher himself thrived, he was aware and recorded somber views in blues lyrics and in sights such as Mammy's in "The Promised Land": Harlem. Thought all along 't was d'las' stop 'fo' Heaven. Canaan hitself. Reg'lar promis' lan'. Well, dat's jes whut 't is—a promisin' lan'. All it do is promise.... My people done fo'got dey God grabbin' after money" (and sensations money could buy).
Fisher was the son of a Baptist minister and one story, "Fire by Night," portrays a minister saddened by the dissolute life of his only surviving son, a World War I veteran. The Rev. Zachary Pride is confident that his son will survive his "devil-born restlessness" and eventually return—aided by the love of a woman of faith and common sense.
In other stories, the "steadying voice of [rural Baptist] tradition" is a devout grandmother who is troubled by the young 'uns godlessness, lust, alcohol consumption, and sinful music and dancing. The most popular and widely reprinted of the stories with the grandmother who raised a boy who is now (at the time of the story) engaged in what she sees as dubious activities is "Miss Cynthie." It has a skillfully drawn rapprochement, though I think that "The Guardian of the Law" is funnier (it's also more violent and more melodramatic). There are also some much sadder resolutions (the "Majutah" segment of "The South Lingers On" and skillfully done by devastating "The Promised Land").
After "City of Refuge" (with a pair of narcs and an King Solomon's employer), there are no white characters. The conflicts are intraracial, and, except for those with elderly kin mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, and "Backslider" in which the upholder of strict morality is not kin) they are also intragenerational. The ones I like most are the two about the young immigrant Ezekiel, the doubling "Backslider," "Guardians of the Law," and "Common Meter." The latter takes place entirely in a jazz club, though, as I said, the "devil's music" rings in nearly every story (and the view of secular music as "the devil's music" was not Fisher's but that of some of the elders in his stories). Its ending may be too good to be true, and Good wins out in many of the stories.
The last (last-written as well as last in placement within the collection) and longest story, "John Archer's Nose," brings back the Harlem physician, John Archer, and his police detective friend, Perry Dart, from The Conjure Man Dies, and involves a structurally similar mystery with similarly convoluted motivations. It is also similar in taking on superstitions and very lethal consequences of superstitions. Although cleverly plotted, I don't find it as satisfying as many of Fisher's other (shorter) stories. I don't think that the reason is that Fisher undertook to write about the "talented tenth" (as Du Bois wanted Fisher and other writers to do). Despite having a physician as the crime-solver, neither the story nor the novel are about him. Dr. Archer is not sufficiently filled out as a character. Sherlock Holmes, to take an example predating Fisher's writing, is also a detached intellect, but readers have some sense of Homes as a character. Dr. Archer is smart and compassionate, but does not come across as an individual. (Neither do Himes's detectives, so maybe lots of violent action is a substitute for character development, and developed detective characters are only necessary in the kind of mysteries in which the suspects are all gathered in one room?)
McCluskey's introduction to the collection is very helpful both in detailing the life and background of the writer and in exploring themes in the fiction (though I think that this would be better in an afterword than in an introduction and wish that he had included the unpublished stories he discusses). He is vague on Fisher's medical history, leaving me to suppose that exposure to radiation is to blame for the stilling of a distinctive Harlem voice at the age of 37.
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My review of The Walls of Jerichodeals with the demands for edifying tales of black success and the insistence of Fisher, Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman in writing about the triumphs and tragedies of ordinary black people, and more background is in my review of Steven Watson's book on Harlem Renaissance.
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