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ERIC Walrond was expected to write ‘The Great Negro Book’. At that time (the 1920s and 1930s) in America, it was the cherished expectation of his fellow writers and colleagues that Walrond was destined to write ‘The Great Negro Book’. The signs of the time were pointing in that direction, and everything Walrond did, and everything he wrote were in accordance with that cherished thought that someone would produce the ‘Great Negro Book’.
Walrond’s first and only collection of fiction, ‘Tropic Death’, was valued alongside ‘The Quest of the Silver Fleece’ by W. E. B. Du Bois; ‘The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’, by James W. Johnson; and ‘Harlem Shadow’, by Claude McKay.
Notable about that landmark collection was the themes Walrond explored; themes of migration, discrimination and prejudices, alienation and identity, poverty and suffering.
Eric Derwent Walrond was born in December 1898 in Georgetown, capital city of Guyana, where he spent his first eight years. His father was Guyanese, and his mother, Ruth, Barbadian.
A year after the devastating 1905 fire of Georgetown, and with his father gone to work on the Panama Canal, the remainder of the family moved to Barbados. There, young Walrond attended the St. Stephen’s Boy’s School in Black Rock, “a dinky, backward village” outside Bridgetown. But the island was just an oasis to this family in an economically troubled Caribbean.
After no contact from the father, and with employment opportunities aplenty digging the canal, the family moved to Panama in 1911. Failing to find the head of the family, they settled in Colón, where Eric Walrond completed his public schooling and went on to be trained as a secretary and stenographer.
His first job was as a clerk at the Health Department of the Canal Commission. From 1916 to 1918, he pursued a career in journalism, working as a general reporter, court reporter and sport journalist at the prestigious Panama Star Herald. Around this time, stories of a better life in America fascinated him, influencing yet another migration.
Walrond entered the USA on June 30, 1918, as part of a mass migration movement that was attracting thousands of West Indians. He lived there for ten years; studied at Columbia University and The City College of New York; and played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance, encountering the vilest forms of class and racial prejudice, triggering his most productive literary years.
Due to unfair employment practices, it took a long while to get his pen moving, but when it fell into a rut, Walrond was able to influence schools of thought and bodies of movement against the inhumanity to Man. He wrote numerous stories and essays to periodicals like the ‘Opportunity’, ‘Smart Set’, ‘Vanity’, ‘Independent’ and ‘Messenger’. His short stories like ‘On Being Black’, ‘On Being Domestic’ and ‘The Stone Rebounds’ were like fodder to Black consciousness at the time.
Later, he was entrusted a greater role in fashioning and changing public attitude when he was made editor to Marcus Garvey’s ‘Negro World’. Walrond also edited Charles S. Johnson’s ‘Opportunity’ and ‘The Brooklyn and Long Island Informer’.
Walrond’s life was one of paradoxes engendered by his writings. He gravitated to the editorship of ‘New World’ after he won a fiction contest sponsored by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (U N I A.) for his piece, ‘A Senator’s Memoirs’.
Later, he fell from grace when he penned, ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?
Added to the mystery of why Walrond did not write that great book was the fact that in that final period of his life, he was reconciled with Marcus Garvey, was in contact with Paul Robeson, and had re-established ties with his British roots (novel writing tradition), and dwelled in the capital of books, yet nothing came from his pen.
For all that, the man who was expected to write ‘The Great Negro Book’ died in obscurity. Eric Walrond died in 1966 on a London street from a heart attack, attracting little or no attention in the USA, Barbados, Panama, nor Guyana. (To respond to this author, either call him on (592) 226-0065 or send him an email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com)
Walrond’s first and only collection of fiction, ‘Tropic Death’, was valued alongside ‘The Quest of the Silver Fleece’ by W. E. B. Du Bois; ‘The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’, by James W. Johnson; and ‘Harlem Shadow’, by Claude McKay.
Notable about that landmark collection was the themes Walrond explored; themes of migration, discrimination and prejudices, alienation and identity, poverty and suffering.
Eric Derwent Walrond was born in December 1898 in Georgetown, capital city of Guyana, where he spent his first eight years. His father was Guyanese, and his mother, Ruth, Barbadian.
A year after the devastating 1905 fire of Georgetown, and with his father gone to work on the Panama Canal, the remainder of the family moved to Barbados. There, young Walrond attended the St. Stephen’s Boy’s School in Black Rock, “a dinky, backward village” outside Bridgetown. But the island was just an oasis to this family in an economically troubled Caribbean.
After no contact from the father, and with employment opportunities aplenty digging the canal, the family moved to Panama in 1911. Failing to find the head of the family, they settled in Colón, where Eric Walrond completed his public schooling and went on to be trained as a secretary and stenographer.
His first job was as a clerk at the Health Department of the Canal Commission. From 1916 to 1918, he pursued a career in journalism, working as a general reporter, court reporter and sport journalist at the prestigious Panama Star Herald. Around this time, stories of a better life in America fascinated him, influencing yet another migration.
Walrond entered the USA on June 30, 1918, as part of a mass migration movement that was attracting thousands of West Indians. He lived there for ten years; studied at Columbia University and The City College of New York; and played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance, encountering the vilest forms of class and racial prejudice, triggering his most productive literary years.
Due to unfair employment practices, it took a long while to get his pen moving, but when it fell into a rut, Walrond was able to influence schools of thought and bodies of movement against the inhumanity to Man. He wrote numerous stories and essays to periodicals like the ‘Opportunity’, ‘Smart Set’, ‘Vanity’, ‘Independent’ and ‘Messenger’. His short stories like ‘On Being Black’, ‘On Being Domestic’ and ‘The Stone Rebounds’ were like fodder to Black consciousness at the time.
Later, he was entrusted a greater role in fashioning and changing public attitude when he was made editor to Marcus Garvey’s ‘Negro World’. Walrond also edited Charles S. Johnson’s ‘Opportunity’ and ‘The Brooklyn and Long Island Informer’.
Walrond’s life was one of paradoxes engendered by his writings. He gravitated to the editorship of ‘New World’ after he won a fiction contest sponsored by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (U N I A.) for his piece, ‘A Senator’s Memoirs’.
Later, he fell from grace when he penned, ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?
Added to the mystery of why Walrond did not write that great book was the fact that in that final period of his life, he was reconciled with Marcus Garvey, was in contact with Paul Robeson, and had re-established ties with his British roots (novel writing tradition), and dwelled in the capital of books, yet nothing came from his pen.
For all that, the man who was expected to write ‘The Great Negro Book’ died in obscurity. Eric Walrond died in 1966 on a London street from a heart attack, attracting little or no attention in the USA, Barbados, Panama, nor Guyana. (To respond to this author, either call him on (592) 226-0065 or send him an email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com)
