The Walls of Jericho

This comic novel, published in 1928, is set in the African-American community of Harlem, New York. This edition was published in London in 1995 by The X Press as part of its Black Classics series. Its central character, Fred Merrit, is an upwardly-mobile black lawyer, who has purchased a house on Court Avenue, an exclusive white street on the edge of Harlem.

The author, Rudolph Fisher (born 9 May 1897), grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. The son of a clergyman, he graduated from Brown University in 1919. He was one of the principal writers of what was known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Among the comic characters he encounters in Agatha Cramp, a wealthy spinster resident of Court Avenue, who mistakes him for a white man due to his relatively pale skin. She is an eager philanthropist and eagerly adopts the charitable cause of the ethnic group from which her maid comes, as well as taking other concerns that she reads about in the newspaper:
“Over the slaughter of Armenians by Turks [in 1915] she had once sobbed bitterly and even over the devastation of the Japanese by earthquake [in 1923] she had mourned a little... but Negroes... they had never actually entered her head.”
That is until she hires an attractive black maid called Linda. She adopts her people’s charitable cause (the Improvement Association founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914). At a fundraising dance, Fred Merrit, playfully pretending to be white, explains black resistance to a credulous Miss Cramp:
“Suppose you were fighting somebody and, at every blow you delivered, your antagonist simply grinned and came on. Wouldn't you soon get scared? Wouldn't you begin to lose your nerve? Wouldn't you begin wondering if maybe the other fellow wasn't grinning at the futility of your blows — if maybe he wasn't just biding his time in the certainty of his power?”

Later Miss Cramp discovers she has been fooled and is greatly alarmed:
“I got interested in the welfare of Negroes and joined a mixed organisation for the improvement of conditions among them, you know. Well, naturally, I had to go about among them... I went... to see how they acted in their own surroundings and there were both white and coloured people in the box with me... And one of them was the man that bought a house almost next door to me here... and... he intends to live in it...
Anyway, suppose neighbours of mine see my name on the literature of the organisation. As soon as this man moves in, I'll be accused.”

When Miss Cramp loses the service of Linda to Fred Merrit, she hires an Irish maid called Mary and interrogates her about the Irish cause:
“I wonder if your people don't need help. Look at the way that Mc Reeny starved to death. Something ought to be done. Isn't there some organisation that takes care of such matters?...
What I mean is this. Here is a young an inexperienced newborn nation, planted on a little isle of the sea, and left quite alone, helpless. It does seem to me that those of us who are in a position to do so should contribute all we can toward their welfare.”