Arna Wendell Bontemps Uncle Buddy Analysis

Arna Wendell Bontemps, an award-winning African American author and poet born on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria, Louisiana, to Creole parents, Marie Carolina Pembrooke and Paul Bismarck Bontemps (Pettis). At the age of three, the Bontemps departed for California after receiving threats from two drunken white men (Arna). In California, Bontemps attended the San Fernando Academy, a predominantly white boarding school, with his father’s message to not “go up there acting colored (Arna).” Bontemps later recognizes this to be an influential statement and he despises what he saw as an endeavor to make him obliterate his heritage. After graduating from Pacific Union College, Bontemps relocated to New York City and accepted a teaching seat at Harlem

Academy (Arna). At the Harlem Academy, he became closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance and befriends major artists such as W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, which later he also collaborated with (Arna).

Bontemps’ move to New York City and his works led to his various writings in the emerging world of the Harlem Renaissance. He developed into an American writer who works delineate the lifestyle and conflicts that black Americans endure during the 1920s.

Some would assume that a father would inspire his son works, but in this case, it was the works of Bontemps’ Uncle Buddy. Uncle Buddy’s pride in their Southern heritage and the conflicts he had with Bontemps’ father schooled him in the contradictory attitudes blacks have toward their Southern heritage and influenced Bontemps in his works, The Old South and God Sends Sunday. In California, Bontemps felt the pressure from his father to separate himself from the rich culture of Louisiana to accommodate into the white standards. While his father held conflicting impression toward Louisiana, he was contented, for the benefit of his children that he had relocated to a contrasting setting. Uncle Buddy was a rich connection of traditional African American culture that endeared himself to Arna Bontemps. Bontemps wrote in the The Old South: “Buddy was still crazy about the minstrel shows and minstrel talk that has been the joy of his young manhood. He loved dialect stories, preacher stories,

ghost stories, and slave and master stories. He half believed in signs and charms and mumbo jumbo, and he believed wholeheartedly in ghosts (Patti).” Unlike his own father, Uncle Buddy educated Bontemps in the antagonistic mindset African American held toward their Southern heritage, as Bontemps uncovered in The Old South. “In their opposing attitudes toward roots, my father and my great-uncle made me aware of a conflict in which every educated American Negro, and some who are not educated, must somehow take sides. By implication at least, one group advocates embracing the richness of the folk heritage; their opposites demand a clean break with the past and all it represents (Patti).” While Bontemps would follow his father’s guidance in school, Bontemps shaped the main character of his novel, God Sends Sunday, on his Uncle Buddy (Arna). Furthermore, relocating to New York influenced him and his works greatly with the emerging Harlem Renaissance Era. There he met Langston Hughes, who influence him and his writing and even collaborated in a few works (Patti). In one of his most popular works, Southern Mansion, Bontemps interprets the situation of blacks as slaves and the racial inequality that still exists. His goals were to make others conscious of how African Americans are still handle crudely even though they do not have to endure the treatment of slavery anymore.

The Harlem Renaissance was a literary, artistic, and intellectual explosion arising in the 1920s and early 1930s that concentrated in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. It was the thriving of African American culture in terms of literature and art exhibiting the growth of Black Nationalism and racial identity (Buck). It displayed a public exhibition of African American poetry, prose, drama, arts and music (Buck). The Harlem Renaissance empowers African Americans to express their feelings through the arts and it also establishes a trend for another generation because then they assume that they could express their emotions too by the means of the arts. In essence, the Harlem Renaissance gave African Americans the hope to expose their work of arts. Arna Bontemps did that exactly. He uses his novels and poetry to enriched and preserved African American culture and heritage.
The “Day-Breakers” was one of the most legendary works, during the period of segregation and discrimination in America. Overall, Bontemps is voicing the bravery and hope that the people of Harlem had for creating an African American Renaissance in a racist world. His poem recites, “ We are not come to wage a strife (Turner)” and then “It is not wise to waste life (Turner)”. Bontemps is saying it is ineffective in fighting considering it will only misuse time because the white people will never accept or take notice to them. He wants to induce African American strength and determination and not to consume their own life battling over it. People in Harlem were determined for a new world beyond racism from whites, on the other hand Bontemps is saying that white people are unyielding, “Against a stubborn will (Turner)” and it is meaningless to spend one own life contend for the hope to reach that goal. We should not fight over something all of our lives, when people are being stubborn and that you should trash the idea and shift forward in life.
In “Southern Mansion,” Arna Bontemps shows the distinction of the lives of the wealthy landowners, who live a lifestyle full of privilege and leisure, with the lives of the slaves who were subjected to assignments in the cotton fields. The speaker of “Southern Mansion” detect the ghosts and hark the “music echoing” from the parlor of the Big House and the “tinkling” of the slaves’ chains in the cotton fields demonstrating the misery of the slaves. The gate in the last stanza illustrates the entrance into this lost world. The ghosts of the slaves have trampled a symbol of the aristocratic life, the rose beds. The poplars are stable witnesses to the ghosts, who are the unquiet souls of the slaves who are exacting retribution for their mistreatment; “Ladies walking two by two beneath the shade and standing on the marble steps (Turner)” illustrates white women shielding their skin, which the society said should stay fair. “Poplars are standing there still as death (Turner)” is repeated at the opening and closure of the poem, indicating that this era may be over but the poplars stand witness to the ghosts that will haunt the property.
Arna Bontemps shine in no single literary genre. Yet the impact of his work as poet, novelist, professor, children’s author, editor, and librarian is far outstanding. He represents a dominant position in carving modern African-American literature and has a sweeping influence on African-American culture of the twentieth century.