A Crack in the Harlem Closet
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            Much like Jenn Shapland in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Brown tells his own version of the story of discovering another writer’s life, although he does so in a more circumspect and tangential way than Shapland did. He begins with a biographical narrative, including sources and footnotes, all in a concise and easy style, about Cullen coming to terms with his same-sex attractions and his two marriages—the first to the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, which lasted for two years and ended in divorce when Cullen confessed his attraction to men. Brown devotes much of the book to Cullen’s life with his second wife, Brown’s own great-grandmother, Ida Mae Robertson Cullen-Cooper. Cullen’s primary dilemma was trying to reconcile the world of high society with that of literature, where he felt more comfortable with his sexual nature and his impoverished childhood. Unlike Shapland, Brown keeps his subject at an emotional remove, so the narrative of Cullen’s life comes off as more of a standard biography. This allows him to put himself in the position of his readers as he begins to recognize truths about Cullen and his circle that lead him to reflect upon his own choices: “I abandon my own novel, forty-five years and two marriages ago, to begin my personal search for a usable past: the fiction you are now reading.”

            In nearly every instance, Brown’s relationship to literature, history, and a Black æsthetic is that of a discerning observer and interpreter. He is not possessive of the legacies he writes about, nor does he insinuate himself into the narratives. Rather, the historical information he gathers provides a lens through which he can view his own development: “Until I’d become a working writer myself, until the challenges of sustaining creativity on a daily basis beyond middle-age became real to me, I simply had no way of imagining Countée as a struggling writer.”

            Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Andy Razaf, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many others—who all seem to have known each other—make appearances as Brown positions the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance as a global movement. By casting light on connections and divergences between the worlds of literature, jazz, blues, religion, politics, education, and science, he dispels the notion that there is a unified identity or experience among the African diaspora, proposing instead a serendipitous flowering of Black achievements and progress in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

            In 1930, as the Depression deepened, most of those associated with the Harlem Renaissance left New York, but Cullen stayed and accepted a job at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he mentored a student in whom he saw great promise, the young James Baldwin. That’s when the divorced Cullen met Ida Mae Robertson. They knew one another for ten years prior to their marriage, after which he lived for only another six. Those sixteen years proved to be the happiest in Cullen’s short life, and he was to a large extent able to reconcile his attraction to men with both his need to be part of the literati and his deep affection for Ida Mae.

            Brown sees Cullen’s sexual self-identification as on “the spectrum of cisgender bisexuality, whether trending homoerotic or heteroerotic,” concluding that “[b]eing closeted seems an historical circumstance, not a character flaw.” In fact, Cullen was more dedicated to concealing his orphaned childhood in poverty than he was to concealing his same-sex attractions. As far as the couple’s sex life is concerned, Brown, a straight man, offers only that Cullen had at least a half-dozen gay lovers and that Ida Mae had a miscarriage during their marriage.

            The story of Countée Cullen’s afterlife is in large measure the story of Ida Mae’s zealous promotion of his work and reputation. Not a public speaker, a poet, or a scholar, she made it her business to advance Cullen’s legacy until her death in 1986. It was during the last twenty years of her life that Kevin Brown developed a relationship with his great-grandmother, which was fueled by his curiosity and her impassioned lectures. A masterful storyteller who revealed more than she intended, Ida Mae was by nature combative, particularly with her great-grandson, and their flareups eventually led to a rift between them. Brown writes, “I had my own biography to live, my own books to write.”

            Ida Mae saw her great-grandson as an inheritor of the “family business,” hoping he would continue to live in the literary world, sustaining the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance as she had. Brown writes about Cullen’s work only from the “standpoint of a practitioner,” not a critic or scholar, and takes the long view about how the evolution of American and global poetic movements, tastes, and styles are related to developments in contemporary Black culture.

            Ida Mae Cullen-Cooper and Kevin Brown’s lives came together once more during the final year of her life, after he had moved to New York City for the first time. Brown’s own story goes on, and he will continue sorting out the exigencies and complications of his life and family legacy: “To this day, even in my solitude I never feel I’m working in isolation. … [M]y predecessors number in the thousands.”