Loyal Blues Book Club with Evviva

Questions:

1. Early on, how are power dynamics; professional, personal, and social, beginning to take shape? Consider what feels clear, and what feels complicated or unresolved?
2. How do Jessie’s relationships with other women, such as Nina and Pocahontas, influence her sense of self and her work?
3. What does the novel's depiction of Harlem more broadly tell us about the time period?

Links:

A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance. National Museum of African American History & Culture. 

Library Talks: Victoria Christopher Murray with Melissa Noel, ‘Harlem Rhapsody,’ NYPL Staff, February 18, 2025.

Questions:

1. At this point in the novel, Jessie and Will's affair is in full swing, complicating her role at The Crisis. Why do you think Jessie was so drawn to him, and how does this relationship complicate her desire to be respected solely on her own merit? What do you think about the author using this relationship to help frame the story?

2. We also see Jessie expanding her circle with friends like Nella Larsen. How do these women support each other against both the overt racism of society and the sexism within their professional spaces? Consider how their conversations depict the way they have to navigate life in this time period.

3. Jessie Fauset has been called ‘the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance’ due to writers she discovered, nurtured, and published during her time as literary editor of The Crisis. How important to you think her work was to the greater movement? What has stood out to you as you’ve been reading?

Links:

W.E.B. DuBois and The Brownies’ Book, Library of Congress Blogs: Timeless, Tucker, Neely. August 4, 2022.

The Crisis, January 1920, Vol. 19, No. 3. Google Books.

Questions:

1. Consider how Jessie and Will’s argument about The Emperor Jones reflects their differing beliefs about the purpose of art and representation. What does their disagreement reveal about the broader debates within the Harlem Renaissance, what does is show about their relationship?

2. How does the author’s depiction of the Pan-African Congress’s atmosphere influence our understanding of Jessie’s experience there, and what does this framing reveal about the broader difficulties faced by Black women in international activist spaces?

3. Consider how Harlem Rhapsody portrays the limitations of the suffrage movement for Black women, and what Jessie’s conversations with her friends tell us about the intersection of race and gender in the fight for voting rights?

Links:

Fernald, Anne E. “From Mentor to Supplicant: The Correspondence of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Langston Hughes.” Modernism/modernity Forum. January 29, 2025.

Singh, Amardeep. Langston Hughes, Poems Published in "The Crisis" 1921-1926. African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology.

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. “Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress.” The Crisis 23, no. 1 (November 1921): pages 12–18. Accessed via University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Digital Collections.