SOURCE: "'Aim High and Go Straight': The Grandmother Figure in the Short Fiction of Rudolph Fisher," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 15, No. 2, Summer, 1981, pp. 55-9.

In the following essay, McCluskey examines Fisher's use of the grandmother figure—often in combination with music and religion—as a healing agent for African Americans new to city life.

To conceive the Harlem Renaissance, a cluster of sociocultural concerns and often over-publicized activities, without regard to the migration of thousands from the rural South and the West Indies is to reduce the Harlem era to a sputtering debate in aesthetics and social history. With hopefully fruitful results we can now build on the works of writers as diverse in method and temperament as Harold Cruse [The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1967], Nathan Huggins [Harlem Renaissance, 1971], and Malcolm Cowley [Exiles Return, 1962], works which have enlarged our sense of the twenties. Yet one...