DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, from Kendra Hamilton's hypertext version of DuBose's novel, Porgy, which Porgy and Bess was based upon. Novel, critical essay, and pictures of Charleston and Catfish Row: <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/PORGY/porghome.html>. The first, "haunting" lines of the novel: "Porgy lived in the Golden Age. Not the Golden Age of a remote and legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past middle life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed (11)."Kendra Hamilton, editor of the hypertext version (follow the above link), writes of Heyward: "Fortunately for the Harlem Renaissance, African-American writers-creating from inside the culture-easily evaded the shoals upon which Van Vechten's kind intentions had foundered. Those who explored "the primitive"--such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston--did so with a generosity of vision undreamed of by the man who considered himself their champion. Such was not the case, however, with the white writers of the period--the Sherwood Andersons, Waldo Franks, Julia Peterkins, and Van Vechtens. Such was not even the case with a writer like Dubose Heyward, whose Porgy was read and admired at least by literary blacks. No less an advocate than Langston Hughes called Heyward one who saw, "with his white eyes, wonderful, poetic qualities in the inhabitants of Catfish Row that makes them come alive . . ."[4]
The Renaissance had long fizzled when Heyward died in 1940, and the nation was engrossed by the spectacle unfolding in Europe-the Nazi advance on Alsace-Lorraine, the fall of the Maginot line, Petain's taking the helm in France. Still Heyward's passing caused the news cycle to pause in its headlong rush for at least a beat. The Charleston papers ran the story next to the lead. Even the national press was lavish in its praise:
"Once the Heywards were among the richest planters of South Carolina . . . It was good fortune for literature and for young Dubose Heyward that the family joined the ranks of the newly poor after the War Between the States," said the New York Times, which also hailed him as the chronicler of the "strange, various, primitive and passionate world"[5] of the Negro.
"[W]ith 'Porgy' Heyward took the first rank," noted the Baltimore Sun. "The humble crippled negro (sic) beggar was a figure made utterly real to Heyward's readers . . . 'Porgy' . . . is, in the most satisfying way, a . . . story written with a skill--no, mastery--that give the reader a sense of fullness, richness, and life."
The New York Tribune, meanwhile, paid the author the highest compliment of all: "His death is a loss for American letters." With these early accounts the elements of Heyward's personal myth seemed firmly in place. The papers stressed a noble ancestry that included a signer of the Declaration of Independence; his family's tragic fall into penury; his personal literary triumphs, earned by dint of hard, lonely effort since his birth couldn't help him and his family was too poor to educate him. Indeed, in the years after Heyward's death, Porgy and Bess, his 1935 collaboration with George Gershwin, was to be revived again and again on Broadway and the West Coast, eventually making a triumphal world tour under the auspices of the State Department from London to Leningrad back through Israel, Egypt, and Central and South America."
Comments on Catfish Row? the Heywards? Dubose Heyward ends the novel with these words: "She looked until she could bear the sight no longer; then she stumbled into her shop and closed the door, leaving Porgy and the goat alone in an irony of morning sunlight." How does this compare with the ending of the opera?
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