Don’t Believe Everything You Hear
After accidentally shooting a white man to death, King Solomon Gillis flees North Carolina to escape certain lynching. He has been told that the only place in America a black man can feel safe is Harlem because a black man’s rights could not be violated nor privileges taken away. Almost literally the second he hits the streets of Harlem he is set upon by a black man named Mouse who seems to be generously helping get established, but is in fact setting him as a mark. The stories of blacks protecting blacks turn out to be seriously untrue.
The Great Migration
The particular story of the experience of southerner King Solomon Gillis coming to Harlem is just entry in a much larger thematic whole covering much of Fisher’s fiction. This new is unique to African-American literature and is represented in many other works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Across the breadth and depth of Fisher’s contributions as an element to a collective whole, “City of Refuge” is like studying a small section of a vast painted mural telling the stories of the mass exodus of blacks from the south and what happened when they arrived in the urban population centers of the north like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and, of course, New York City. Two of the author’s most renowned works belong to this thematic tapestry and the tragedy of King Solmon Gillis is most sharply juxtaposed with story of “Miss Cynthie” making her first visit to New York to see exactly how her grandson has managed to become so successful since leaving their small southern town.
Black Pride
The exploration of black pride is handled in the story in one of the most surprising and ironic ways imaginable. Almost every character in the story is black, but the author makes sure that readers understand similarity of skin pigmentation is not the same thing as being clones. Mouse is ferociously prejudiced against West Indians in Harlem and treats Gillis as being a rube from Dixie with whom he has almost nothing in common. Harlem is a place where even the policeman can be black and this so impresses Gillis that it occupies his fantasy life almost as much as the girl in the green stockings he fantasizes about. By the end, both these fantasies come together as Gillis seems to lapse almost into a fugue state in the middle of being arrested for drug-peddling because his attention is single-mindedly focused on the white man forcing his attentions upon the girl in the stockings who happens to be in the same cabaret at the same time. He must fight his way toward against the white detectives who think he’s merely resisting arrest and it is only when knocks one to the floor and turns around to face a black uniformed officer that he stops and gives himself up in a show of appreciation and loyalty to the spirit of his genuine pride that there really does exist a place where a black man can become an officer of the law.
